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The hotness score of a question is influenced by the reaction of users arriving from across the network. Since most of such users do not have 125 rep on the question's site, the feedback SE receives is one-sided: the algorithm hears those who like the question (via upvotes), and ignores those who do not like it (they can't downvote).

I propose that negative feedback be collected as well: when a user with 15+ (or maybe 101+) reputation on question's site clicks the down arrow, this feedback should decrease the hotness of the question.

This proposal is somewhat similar to Logged in users with less than 15 reputation should be able to give feedback, but differs in the following:

  • proposes collecting negative feedback from <125 rep users, not positive feedback from <15 rep users.
  • proposes using the feedback in the hotness formula.

The hope is that more balanced feedback would result in better selection of questions that are of genuine quality, not merely accessible to many.

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  • Are you saying that this kind of downvote would be separate from a real downvote and only useable by people who are new to the site?
    – MrLore
    Commented Aug 24, 2014 at 2:04
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    Yes. This kind of feedback already exists, but as far as I know, it's not collected from registered users, and is not used for hotness score.
    – user259867
    Commented Aug 24, 2014 at 2:07
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    similar idea to somehow track and account for negative feedback in "exposed" questions is currently discussed in Impose a 24 hour voting freeze on questions being discussed on Meta: "the best thing that I can think of would be to raise a system flag when something has dipped significantly in score, and this dip is due to votes that stemmed from a link..."
    – gnat
    Commented Aug 25, 2014 at 11:12
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    related: At smaller sites, penalize hot questions having 3-4 close votes (as of now, even feedback from 3K users on bad questions is ignored in hot list)
    – gnat
    Commented Sep 2, 2014 at 15:14
  • Opens up a bit more room for revenge }:)
    – nelomad
    Commented Aug 11, 2016 at 1:26

1 Answer 1

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I disagree, I think it should be up to the community of the site where the question originates to decide if the question is worthy of being a hot network question, not users who have not participated (much) in that site.

This is to say, you're proposing that only new users or people who have never used a site should be the ones to judge whether a question is good, but I think it's the people who are active on that site, who know what is on topic and how to write a good post are the ones whose votes really matter. So if anyone should have this power, it should be higher rep users on the site.

Furthermore, if you know enough about the topic that you feel a post is bad/wrong and worthy of a downvote, it should be trivial for you to earn yourself 124 reputation (or 24 reputation with an association bonus) on the site dedicate to that topic, you can then downvote the answer at your convenience.

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  • 3
    I think I understand what you're saying, but I'm not sure this qualifies as disagreement. My understanding of this proposal is, when many hot list visitors find a question unworthy (boring or something), this should be somehow taken into account. In cases like this, it sounds somewhat fair to consider their feedback, even if it goes against what local community thinks (and even more so if local community also thinks the question isn't worthy). Local regulars can be fascinated but if hot list visitors find it boring, why forcing them to read it
    – gnat
    Commented Aug 24, 2014 at 7:52
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    The problem with is is, though, that new users are very well allowed to judge the quality of a question, just that at the moment they can only judge it to be good or do nothing, which results in excatly the judgement bias (and resulting "epidemic" hotness) we have.
    – Christian Rau
    Commented Aug 24, 2014 at 10:52
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    "This is to say, you're proposing that only new users or people who have never used a site should be the ones to judge whether a question is good" - I don't see this suggested. People active on the site can always downvote (I know, nobody likes to do it, but they at least can). "but I think it's the people who are active on that site, who know what is on topic and how to write a good post are the ones whose votes really matter." - Then the logical consequence of this is, that new 101 users arriving on a hot network question should not be allowed to upvote it immediately.
    – Christian Rau
    Commented Aug 24, 2014 at 10:56
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    "it should be up to the community of the site..." -- this reasoning seems to be better reflected in another feature request: Prevent questions on Hot List from being upvoted by casual visitors (only rep is from association bonus)
    – gnat
    Commented Oct 22, 2014 at 8:57

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