Should we have a policy about "too much downvoting"?

Question

We've never had an explicit policy around downvoting -- users are free to, if they like, cast all their votes as downvotes. Whether this behavior is desirable or not is another matter.

Now, we do discourage downvoting by making downvotes cost -1 rep to the casting voter. But, there's nothing in our policy that says continual downvoting is bad or wrong or inappropriate.

However, my thoughts on this are changing. I no longer think it is community friendly behavior to cast an extreme number of downvotes, and I am considering an explicit policy forbidding it.

Some data points (as of today):

Total SO upvotes cast:
45,555,530

Total downvotes cast:
365,192

users with more than 100 downvotes cast:
596

users with > 100 downvotes and the lowest ratio of upvotes to downvotes:

downvotes	upvotes	up:down ratio
201	37	0.18
580	149	0.25
137	43	0.31
438	140	0.31
236	94	0.39
3299	1337	0.40
126	66	0.52
348	198	0.56
181	109	0.60
310	197	0.63
198	132	0.66
170	116	0.68
219	152	0.69
167	118	0.70
120	86	0.71
273	201	0.73
135	101	0.74
573	430	0.75

(this is a complete list, there are no more below this threshold.)

Based on this data I am leaning towards enforcing a "no more downvotes may be cast" if

1. You have at least (n) votes cast total
2. Your upvote to downvote ratio is lower than ~ 0.5

Answer 1

If I'm reading your output correctly, only a small minority of users would even be affected by this. If you pick n = 100, and the ratio you suggest, how many is that exactly of our 596?

And is this really bothering you that much that you're going to pipeline this past all of the other status-planned changes we've been waiting on, just to get these people to fall into line with what you have literally just decided is your point of view?

Your data can be interpreted another way: People are severely attached to their reputation scores. Take me, for example. Do you really think I've only ever seen 33 questions or answers worthy of a downvote on all of SO in my time there? Of course not. I just don't see the point in wasting reputation points. I don't think people are withholding downvotes out of a warm-and-fuzzy sense of community. They just want a high score. Therefore, the inverse corrolary doesn't hold: People are not downvoting because they are anti-community sociopaths. They are doing us all a favor by burning rep for the sake of accurately representing content.

If you want to change the ratios as you've planned to do for 9 months, great, the community has pretty clearly been in favor of that. But automatically blocking people from making editorial decisions based on automated user profiling just seems to make no sense.

All you've demonstrated is that these people are a minority, the reasoning apparently being since they are a tiny minority, they must be doing something wrong. But you have not demonstrated by any means that they are performing a disservice to, or harming, the community in any way. Since that's your ostensible rationale for this change, I'd like to see the evidence of that.

Answer 2

I'm definitely against this.

Total SO upvotes cast:
45,555,530

Total downvotes cast:
365,192

For every 1 downvote, there are nearly 125 upvotes cast. This indicates, at least to me, an overall very positive and supportive community!

There will always be people who think downvoting more often is appropriate. There are positive aspects about the people who aren't afraid to speak what's on their mind and vote for what they think is right, be it upvotes or downvotes. Sometimes the person who goes against the grain gives us an insight that we never would have thought about otherwise. That is a huge value to the community!

The ones who have no benefit (i.e., serial downvoting for no reason) are already mostly taken care of by the anti-abuse scripting, which, I should point out, does the same thing on upvotes as well as downvotes.

Answer 3

This is a kind of sticky one... On the one hand, I believe that people should be able to vote how they choose on posts. Especially (as has been pointed out) since there's a large portion of people who shy away from downvoting posts that truly deserve it, since they don't want to hurt their own rep. So having a minority who downvotes heavily is arguably a good thing, to make sure those (deserved) downvotes are still getting given (of course this presupposes that the downvoters in question are downvoting posts that legitimately deserve it, but you haven't provided data either way on that).

On the other hand, having disgruntled users (& the team swamped with emails) is obviously not a good long term scenario either...

Another random idea: Make the cost of a downvote relative to your up:down ratio like so (obviously you'd want to tweak the numbers)...

 Up:down ratio | Rep cost for a downvote
---------------+------------------------
 > 200:1       |  0
 > 100:1       |  1
 > 10:1        |  2
 > 5:1         |  3
 > 2:1         |  5
 > 0:1         |  10

That way people can still vote how they want, but if you're a serial downvoter, its going to cost you. Probably more complicated than its worth (& no doubt confusing to the user), but at least there's no hard limit on the user behaviour.

It would also encourage people to make some downvotes (since they're free if you don't make many), which I think overall is a good thing for the health of the SO ecosystem (we need some reasonable number of downvotes happening to keep some semblance of control on the noise. Hopefully this suggestion would even out the downvoting across the board rather than having the bulk who barely downvote at all and a minority who downvote heavily.

Answer 4

When I first saw this question title, I thought it was from a new user. Imagine my surprise when I saw it was Jeff Atwood who posted the question.

Two things:

1. Liberty lost for one is liberty lost for all. There's no getting around that.
2. Downvoting incurs a cost, yet it provides as much of a benefit as upvoting. It lets the passerby know what's 'good' and what's 'bad'.

We already know that there are reports of sympathy upvotes (many, many reports). We know that users that serially vote for another user have their reputation recalculated.

So why are we punishing people for their non-targeted aggregate behavior?

If you're going to target people who only downvote, please also show us the data for people who mostly or only upvote. I think they are the problem because it's not possible for them not to have seen a 'bad' post in all their time here.

Answer 5

You're worried there's too much down-voting.

Neil's worried there's too much up-voting.

Maybe there's just too much voting?

When SO was young, it was important that each user be able to really spread the love so to speak; now, there are lots and lots of users who can and do vote. Maybe it's time to reduce the daily allotment of votes, up and down...

Answer 6

I'm not a big fan of upvoting everything in sight, either, yet I don't see that being considered a problem. It seems absurd to stop people from casting their votes as they see fit, as long as they're not gaming the system, doing it out of malice or with bad intentions.

There's already a rep hit for downvoting. This rep hit should be increased to -2/-5 as proposed just to make it harder, but the total number of downvotes you're allowed to have should not change. Some questions and answers are bad, there's no denying it, no matter how much editing you do. Why not be allowed to downvote it? It's a democratic process. They'll receive pity upvotes anyway (which is probably one of the worst thing to do anyway; don't encourage people to be lazy, to not put any effort and to misinform).

The only reason you've given is to keep the Trilogy community friendly. Ok, I agree, downvoting a lot seems unfriendly, but there needs to be some sort of backlash for undesired behavior. If my question gets closed within minutes or gets edited too much, I might feel equally upset, especially as a new user. Almost anything can be perceived as negative, even good things as closing as duplicate.

Maybe we're too scared to lose our precious rep. That could be a reason why there are so few people with a lot of downvotes, not because everyone is trying to be friendly.

---

Edit: reading Jeff's comments from this post I see that his intention is to reduce the complaints about downvotes. And I have the perfect solution! No more downvotes! There's too many of them; 0.8% of all votes cast, simply enormous!1!!

Of course people complain about downvotes, they're a form of punishment and of disagreement. No one likes to be proved wrong or to be punished for being sloppy/ignorant/just plain wrong! The -1 we receive when we downvote is also a sort of punishment and a deterrent, yet we don't complain about it.

We've been rather vocal about the 30s limit on comments, limit on name changes, lack of explanations regarding haikus, rep losses due to rep recalcs and a lot of other stuff, yet I don't see any of that changing. You want to make people feel better, yet you're once again annoying a very active part of the community. Why?

Have you looked into each email and examined it carefully? Have those people really been wronged? Were they only downvoted by the people you pointed out in your question or were they downvoted by multiple members of the community? You just want to find scapegoats for the angry members of the community that have been downvoted yet maybe those downvotes were warranted.

Answer 7

I no longer think it is community friendly behavior to cast an extreme number of downvotes, and I am considering an explicit policy forbidding it.

Are you trying to make people act friendly by changing policy? On the face of it, that doesn't sound like a good idea at all.

The world is not a carebear world, and even though I want the SO environment to be more welcoming than the real world, I don't see legislating downvotes changing that. The main sources of unfriendliness are, IMHO, comments, answers, and other actions, rather than downvotes.

I've noticed more downvoting on my part recently. I went from somewhere around 1,700:600 (2.83:1) to my present 1,893:1,110 (1.71:1) for about 200:500 (0.40:1) in my most recent votes. According to those numbers, approx. my last month's worth of voting doesn't meet the suggested 'friendliness requirement'. Yet, I don't feel like I'm doing anything wrong. Am I blind and hateful?

It's not a conscious decision, but I have run into the daily vote limit often^[1]. Perhaps I have subconsciously realized I only have 30 votes per day and that upvoting from 5 to 6 isn't nearly as useful as legitimately downvoting from 2 to 1 or 0 to -1? It's not that I don't want to upvote; I'm trying to make the most positive impact possible (legitimately pointing out errors and flaws should be a positive improvement, right?^[2]) and have limited votes to do it with.

^{[1] Speaking of which, I bookmark posts when that happens, is my rapid-fire voting the next day on all those saved bookmarks triggering any "suspicious voting"?
[2] I am happy to reverse the vote when they respond to my comment and point out where I'm wrong, or fix the flaw, etc. Or, as pointed out elsewhere here, if they just delete then they can get the rep back in a recalc, but the downvote stays on my record.}

To temper that 200:500 ratio, I realized that a large chunk of those downvotes (about 100? strongly doubt it's more) are from community wiki questions, where I downvoted to express opinion, indicate duplicates (e.g. on the questions with 75+ answers), and so forth. I have more "large" CW questions bookmarked, and could easily add 30 downvotes/day for several days by just going through most of them (again, upvoting good answers on those questions is largely redundant at this point, and I'd rather point out duplicates and flaws).

In reference to dmckee's comment regarding downvotes being appropriate: In a rep recalc (completed recently, and the first my account has ever had, AFAIK), I gained ~100 rep but didn't see a decrease in my downvote count. However, I also know I have one deleted answer with +6 votes, plus misc. others, so could it have been up to ~200 downvotes on now deleted non-CW questions/answers? I have extremely few, if any, downvoted and deleted answers (e.g. no peer pressure badge).

Taking the higher estimate of 200 downvotes (but please someone mention if I've misinterpreted), that means roughly 18% of my downvotes have been explicitly endorsed by either the original poster or the high-rep users (i.e. owner-deleted answer or closed+deleted question+answers), which seems like a decent percentage.

Answer 8

I don't like the fact that I have to pay to disagree with someone, but I get it. If downvoting didn't cost something, the community could become very divisive (and retaliatory). On the theory that one's life is much more pleasant when a person is positive themselves, I try to make sure that I reserve downvotes for things that are actively harmful - wrong/bad answers and abusive questions - and try to commend things much more than I knock things -- stems from advice that you need to give your kid 10 "attaboys" for each "wtf" just to keep things in balance.

BUT as long as people are following the rules, I respect their right to disagree with my philosophy. I'd need to be convinced that the behavior has materially damaged the site before I'd support adding new rules to limit the behavior.

Personally, if you truly think this makes a person a bad community member, I'd be more inclined to expose it -- and other behaviors, like excessive question asking -- as part of an expanded "reputation" display. I have no idea what nomenclature you'd use, but I'm thinking along the lines of "5427 knowledge 1268 community 0.85 participation" -- where the first represents reputation, but only from answers, not questions, the second represents contributing to others via votes, comments, etc, and the third the ratio of getting (asking) to giving (answering). If you could encapsulate this into a single number for reputation with the ability to expand it a la the up/down votes on a question/answer to see the component parts, that would be ideal.

Answer 9

Have you looked at the heavy downvoters and seen whether the questions/answers they downvote deserve it or not?

Further thoughts: Do the heavy downvoters tend to downvote the newbies? Maybe we should add spawning protection for new users against heavy downvoters.

Answer 10

There are 18 users who exhibit this poor behavior out of how many now? And how significant has the 'damage' been?

Tempted to close this as "too localized"...

;-P

But hey, I'm at the opposite extreme. If you're going to force people to play pollyanna, you probably ought to make sure people like me have to play punisher occasionally.

I can't say I'm a big fan of halting people at the poll box and inspecting their vote before allowing them to cast it, but you've got all the data. Balancing a game is hard, and if this behavior is proving damaging then something does have to be done about it.

Answer 11

I have a hypothesis. Implementing this policy won't change the flow of email.

I support this hypothesis as follows:

Most Stack Overflow users pass through three instars: larva, pupa, and moth.

Larval users have such low rep that a downvote feels like a real hit. This feeling is amplified by the initial shock of that first bit of negative feedback.

Pupae have enough rep that the impact of a downvote is no longer a significant hit to their overall rep. Further, in the process of gaining that rep, they've met enough negative comments and downvotes to have some thickness of skin. (Unless, of course, they've gotten their rep entirely by throwing softball questions.) However, they are still coveteous of their rep, and so downvote sparingly, if at all.

Moths have enough rep to spend it on downvotes, and are really not perturbed by them.

Thus, my claim: even polite, low-ratio downvoting will continue to generate plenty of complaining email. Because it is human nature to complain about the perceived unfairness of negative feedback. (And I bet that your email comes from a bimodal distribution: larvae and the constitutionally hypersensitive.)

On Meta, all the time, we write 'votes are on content, not people.' But the rep system guarantees that people will feel the sting. If you want happier users, then you need some way of getting bad content to sink without ruffling the feathers of its creators. This strikes me as a quest for a square circle.

If you are going to limit downvotes, I wish that you'd put a symmetrical limit on upvotes. Require more rep for them, or limit them. I mostly downvote to counteract the effects of what I see as ridiculous upvotes. I'm ready to leave something mediocre at '0', but I am provoked into spending rep when I see positive numbers on content of negative value.

Edit: I have some concrete suggestions:

1. An 'interstitial' page that comes up for the first N postings, for small N. It would say:

1.1. Content you post is licensed, forever, to the site.

1.2. People get to vote on your content. Sooner or later, you will get downvoted. Have faith; if you contribute to the site over the long term your upvotes will be many more than your downvotes. Please do not send unhappy email to the management just because you get a downvote.

2. Voting on question requires M points of rep, where M is at least 500.

Answer 12

What I don't like is that I always saw voting as an independent thing, only relevant to the context of the post in question.

With this, you are tying voting with a user behaviour (ie: you already downvoted too much, go upvote a little more).

Wouldn't this force the user to upvote stuff he wouldn't have upvoted hadn't this restriction existed?
Is downvoting really such a big problem?

Answer 13

I no longer think it is community friendly behavior to cast an extreme number of downvotes

Jeff - while it is obviously your call, you being the Boss and all, this pronouncement seems to be running somewhat counter to your usual motto of "let's stop guessing and support with data".

As such, i'd like to respectfully request that you provide the data and the reasoning behind that specific statement (as opposed to the data you provided that merely shows that there are a couple of large-scale downvoters, without substantiating why those people's behavior is, indeed, bad).

Just to be clear - I'm not necessarily disagreeng with that exact statement, provided you pick some reasonable definition of "extreme".

But I'm extremely worried that it will lead to an un-intended consequence of having people use this statement to support the sentiments of "ALL downvoting is not a community friendly behavior" and the corollary "Let's upvote crap even more than we do now"

Answer 14

Okay, new answer. Let's assume for the sake of discussion that this problem is real and must be addressed. Is this policy an effective way to do that?

In my opinion, the only effect of this policy would be cultural. That is, Jeff and moderators could then truthfully say, "Excessive downvoting is viewed as anti-community and is discouraged." That in itself can be a powerful message that could have positive benefits.

Beyond that, I see little benefit. The six people who would be affected have cast a total of 1800 votes, or about half a percent of all downvotes, or 0.003% of all votes. So in all likelihood, people will continue to receive downvotes which are upsetting to them.

In addition, the people affected can easily get around this to continue to cast downvotes as they see fit, simply by also casting upvotes. It doesn't seem to me that a person who is upset by downvotes will be less upset by the fact that the downvoter has cast more upvotes than is currently the case. Rather, I think that the recipient of the downvotes first becomes upset, and then goes to look for reasons why the downvote they received was unfair. While this will reduce the incidence of one of those reasons (for six users), I think that the overall effect from the downvote recipient's perspective will be negligible.

In summary, if we are simply looking for something we can say to the community when they are upset by excessive downvoting, this will be suitable. If we are looking for a way to reduce excessive downvoting and keep people from getting upset in the first place, I don't think this will do very much.

Answer 15

Jeff said:

"Legislation to fight the behaviour of six people is stupid" This is the nature of most laws: the actions of an extreme few require new laws to be instated. This social pattern has repeated itself over and over, even in the relatively brief history of Stack Overflow.

Yes, that's a common social pattern. But is it right? Well let's take a pause and go read this article over here...

The behaviour of one man has skewed the concept of everyday life for everyone else.

It’s [the] oddball 5% that is targeted by the tidal wave of legislation... It just changes the pattern of everyday life for everyone else. This is what drives me mad...

Happily, however, I have a solution to the problem, a way that normal human behaviour can be preserved. It’s simple. We must start to accept that 5% of the population at any given time is bonkers. There are no steps to be taken to stamp this out and no lessons to be learnt.

I can't agree strongly enough with Adam's post:

And is this really bothering you that much that you're going to pipeline this past all of the other status-planned changes we've been waiting on...

Please just implement the weight change of votes and we'll see behaviour changed, in a more even-handed manner. Heck, implement it first on meta as a beta test. But this is a more balanced approach than implementing a cap. If you have to put in a cap, that's a sign that something else is wrong.

Lastly, the tone of discourse on this thread has been really disappointing from one person in particular. I expected a bit more maturity, especially given the position he's in. I will continue to flag posts as offensive as I see them. Perhaps I should have been mailing complaints instead if I wished them to result in immediate action? I guess the squeaky wheel really does get the grease.

Answer 16

Jeff, the overall figures you've come up with tally with what I've noticed myself on SF. In general, active users tend to cast (very) roughly a 1:10 ration of votes. I really can't see the need for a policy change to handle the very minute number of extreme radicals you've uncovered. Just leave it be and accept that we're all different.

Answer 17

This is probably good to put in place if you're still planning on raising the hit taken from a downvote.

Answer 18

Currently I have cast of 288 downvotes, and I feel that I should not be limited to openly expressing that I believe a question or answer is bad/wrong/not useful.

Knowing this:

Ratio Cap

An upvote/downvote ratio would be a nice way of dealing with this. It allows the people that legitimately want to downvote people to continue to do so, but makes sure that they are also actively upvoting people as well.

The problem would be the frequency of ratio calculation. If the calculation is cached, there are a large number of ways it could be abused.

---

Moving Cap

Another possible solution might be a moving cap. Every week or so, take a percentage of the current posts (questions/answers), and that would be the cap.

---

All in all, I would favor against imposing any sort of limit besides the increase in the amount of rep both the voter and the receiver are deducted.

Answer 19

I'm going to post this as an answer just because the comment thread on the appropriate answer is long enough.

Have you run your query on Meta?

Answer 20

What I suggest doing is provide a warning to these particularly heavy handed users.

Only then, if the situation get's worse should someone intervene.

Answer 21

I wasn't sure until I read Jeff's comment:

"is this a big problem" considering the ratio we're talking about would affect 6 users out of a userbase of about 100k, I'd say no. But the ill will generated by this behavior has a disproportionately large effect, to the point that it starts driving out friendliness and replacing it with bitterness, discontent, and ultimately vindictiveness.

Nastiness tends to spread. Even if you don't mean to be nasty, you had a bad day/week, and just spewed your venom for a little bit and are back to normal, the venom's in circulation. Coupled with the fact that it's specifically designed/intended to affect edge cases, I think it makes sense.

People, and people who pride themselves on their knowledge in particular, can either be prone to or become trapped in a self-perpetuating cycle of disdain and derision. It's not a problem yet, perhaps, because SO goes out of its way to encourage positive interaction. Don't ask me about numbers, I don't have them. But go look at the old tech forums and bulletin boards. Or just remember the atmosphere. Do you think people intended to set up a place where every thread could turn into a flame war or snipefest? I don't think, generally, that's the case, but I do think it became a widely known issue for a reason.

Answer 22

I'm ambivalent. I generally don't like to see absolute constraints, but we do need to maintain a welcoming enough community that new users do not get driven out.

What do we have by way of evidence (or even anecdote) that these sourpuss users are causing trouble?

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That said, if you are going to go ahead with it, the limits you suggest are conservative, and will affect very few users.

I will suggest:

• Set the controlling ratio at 1:2 up:down
• Set n at 150 (half of the Civic Duty threshold) or more
• Allow a waiting period between announcement and application