Should downvotes on questions be "free"?

Question

As I'm sure you all know, downvotes "cost" 1 reputation. That is, every time you downvote:

-2 to post owner
-1 to you

This is done to make sure downvotes are cast only when you feel strongly that something is incorrect / wrong / dangerous / of low quality.

We've been tweaking a few things to increase overall voting, particularly on questions -- read all about it on the blog entry Vote For This Question or The Kitten Gets It.

These tweaks appear to be working. We're seeing good initial results; here's a graph of question votes (just question votes) across SO, SU, and SF over the last 60 days.

(for question and answer votes together, see these graphs.)

Edit by Jon: Jeff sent me the source data, so here are the upvote/downvote ratio graphs I asked for. The high peaks are artifacts due to low traffic volumes/insufficient data (there were zero question downvotes on SF on a few days).

Now, when I said "increase voting", I meant in both directions, up and down. I feel downvoting on questions is particularly useful to distinguish a well-written, researched, clear and useful question from .. well, a question that is none of those things.

Thus, to incentivize more balanced question voting, we are considering removing the -1 cost of casting a downvote on a question.

That is, downvoting a question -- and only a question -- would now be

-2 to post owner
no cost to you

Your thoughts?

Answer 1

Completed, all question downvotes now are "free" for the downvoter.

We did not perform a global recalc.

If you would like your old question downvotes to be free, perform a self-recalc at: https://stackoverflow.com/reputation

We will be monitoring voting patterns over the next few weeks and evaluate the effect of this change.

Answer 2

Free downvotes for everyone sounds like a triple backflip jump to the Wild West to me.

Please, don't give free bullets to everyone or the number of "care to explain the downvote?" comments will saturate the RAM of your Database servers ^*.

I would suggest a less violent approach:

Give just SOME free ammo to the users who are daily fighting against bad questions, flagging and editing things, trying to keep the streets clean.

Which are some indicators of this good behavior?

1. Flag weight
2. Badges like Strunk & white or copy editor

These two factors should indicate if the user really deserves some free downvotes to spend.

In a nutshell:
downvotes at zero cost privilege should be earned and not given for free

^{* oh, and even with a petabyte of RAM per server}

Answer 3

Even at -1 rep per downvote, I can see how it can feel like the penalty adds up after a few downvotes: "I would downvote this, but I've already downvoted 5 other answers. I don't want to lose more rep today." Loss aversion is a very strong (de)motivator, so people avoid downvoting due to the rep penalty. I will admit to downvoting less if my rep is a "nice" number, for some value of "nice", or if doing so would put me below a privilege threshold.

I think removing the penalty is worth a shot. I think it'd encourage downvoting as a viable method of responding to a bad question or answer, and if someone decided to abuse it and go downvote-crazy, the fraud detection would catch the most damaging scenarios.

Answer 4

If the loss of a reputation point really is one of the main motivators behind the lack of downvoting, then I guess making it free or cheaper is indeed the way to go.

How about not making it entirely free though, to keep a tiny safeguard in place? Like, making every 5 or 10 downvotes cost one point?

The normal rep count would continue to be displayed as an integer; for those who really need to know, the exact number could be displayed privately on the profile page, much like flag weight.

Just to offer another option. I'm not sure - completely free downvoting may indeed be the answer. It would see more abuse as a tool in personal conflicts, but that happens already and the net benefit is likely to vastly overshadow that.

Answer 5

I like that down votes cost because it makes you think about down voting. However, I think that once you understand and are a proven supporter of making the site better down votes should be free. So maybe if you have under X rep you have to pay for down voting and above that you get it for free. That would hopefully encourage the people you really want voting to do so.

Answer 6

I'm of two minds here.

I'm generally of the opinion that more downvoting would be good for SO.* I certainly agree with the idea of making us pause before downvoting, but I also support making downvoting easier.

That having been said, I wonder about the effectiveness of this. First, because I'd say most questions I see that "deserve" downvotes are from new users who either don't understand or wouldn't be affected by the rep loss; why bother downvoting such questions? Second, because a lot of questions that I would downvote also deserve close votes, and it seems to me that the close vote is more appropriate (we don't want bad questions at all), more effective (a close stops answers from being posted), and less likely to evoke the pity upvote.

Overall, yes, please make me think only twice rather than thrice before downvoting, but I'm not sure that this is the way to do it.

---

_{*Although I also just spent a week restraining my downvote urge because I thought my personal down/up ratio had got too large. /shrug}

Answer 7

Some unadorned thoughts: this change would spur me to vote more on questions. Even though I have a fairly high rep on SO, I don't feel very free giving those points up. I'm a bit selfish, I guess, and I could burn through a dozen downvotes in a particularly bad 15 minutes of browsing the front page. Also, I like seeing my rep at a nice pretty multiple of two or five, and I'll sometimes be hesitant to change it.

I wonder what kind of unappealing change we'll see to voting patterns, though. Find a bad question, and you'll often find a half-dozen comments that reflect poorly on the community ("OMG where do people this dumb come from?"). I'd hate to see that kind of attitude move from comments to downvotes.

Answer 8

I'm a new user, so this is from the perspective of someone with limited exposure to the complexities of user interaction on Stack Overflow. Personally, at no point did the deduction of 1 point concern me about down-voting. In general I feel hesitant to down-vote because I imagine it will make the other person feel rather shitty. I'd rather see questions getting more up-votes (and hopefully more attention) rather than focusing on making it easier to down-vote users. Honestly I'd rather a zero-penalty on down-votes altogether, and maybe even prevent negative vote-count on questions at all. Instead, perhaps automatically close questions after they reach a certain threshold. No reason to hurt anyone's feelings, or damage anyone's rep. A question gets closed, no harm done, the person asking the question will hopefully harbor no ill-will and will most likely endeavor to do better the next time.

Answer 9

I've come to several conclusions here:

• That having a cost to downvoting generally discourages downvoting.
• That the fact upvotes are free does not mean everyone will use them appropriately.
• That the above two facts plus human nature to be critical probably means free downvotes will be abused on some small scale, leading to "@Downvoter NOOOO MY REP YOU &*#%!" and "Eeeek, Jeff this no fair" etc.
• While the above point is true, you will also get an increased downvoting on questions by making it free.

Pekka or his troll I think has the right idea, but I disagree with making every X downvote cost. I think downvotes should cost, but based on some increasing factor of contribution to the site, every Y downvote, where Y is that factor, should be free. I personally would base it on a combination of flag weight, close votes used (or perhaps questions you've actually help close/migrate) and downvotes cast, so the more you moderate, the more you are able to moderate. I'll leave the details to you.

I also think this is slightly the wrong angle to attack the problem at. I realise the aim here is to renew the focus on quality / well-asked questions, but I think the problem isn't that people don't downvote these questions enough, it's that people are beginning to provide answers, comments etc anyway before a question can be closed, rather than voting to close and walking away. I also have more of a problem with poor one line answers than I do questions, since the fact your rubbish question gets attention is the root of the problem. A sort of Creeping-phpBBism.

Personally, to echo Josh, if a question is rubbish, I don't bother downvoting, I just vote to close. I'm not downvote shy (in fact I'm increasingly downvoting) since I've over 100 downvotes, which if I hadn't cast would put me into 10k rep already, but why spend -1 when I can close it? Moreover, are there that many questions (yes, there will be some, but...) which attract a negative rep which should be left open? Finally, as I understand it when the question gets deleted they get that rep back anyway.

Just some thoughts. However, if you do give me free downvotes on questions I will more than happily use them.

Answer 10

As someone who does not yet have close vote privileges, the "cost" of a downvote does affect my behaviour on the site. I am much more likely to flag a question (or an answer) than to downvote it. This does apply with additional force if I have just passed a threshold for privileges. I therefore end up flagging Q&A that are real dross, and am less likely to use my voting as a mechanism to indicate perceived quality.

If you were to change as suggested, removing the cost of downvoting questions, it would have an impact on my actions. If this sort of change would lead (if followed more widely) to the desired increased focus on question voting, then I would be all in favour of it.

Answer 11

I don't like change. But I guess it has merit. (An answer downvotes graph would help to judge it better..)

Usually I avoid downvoting newcomer questions. It's pointless to downvote a rep 1 user. And if it costs me -1 without affecting that account, I do in fact opt out. (But most people use closevotes in lieu of downvotes in these cases anyway.)

So making that free would indeed incentivize me to downvote more questions. But I believe I'm already downvoting too few answers. And if this idea is given a roll, I would request that this is used to at least even out the discrepancy between question and answer votes:

               cost  upvote      cost  downvote

 question      0     +5          0     -1 

 answer        0     +10        -1     -2

If upvotes only bring half as much reputation win, then downvotes should subtract only half of what answer downvotes do. And I assume it would cause less hurt feelings if the free downvotes cause less loss there.

Regarding the pity upvotes that's maybe not such a glamorous idea. Albeit there is the same discrepancy of requiring 5 downvotes to cancel out a pity answer upvote. (And dangerous answers IMHO require fiercer eradiction than unreadable questions.)

(The banning metrics would be unaffected by the reputation charges. It's the downvotes alone that count.)

Answer 12

Perhaps you should only get 10 free question downvotes per day. (Akin to 10 extra question votes per day)

This will stop people from going crazy with downvotes, but it will still incentivize (sp?) downvoting questions.

I'd imagine that the number of people downvoting more than 10 questions per day is already really low.

Answer 13

I see this as having the unintended side effect of encouraging users to pick the lazy option of downvoting instead of choosing the right option of editing to clarify or better phrase a valuable but poorly written question.

In cases where a question has little quality in its own right, then encouraging downvoting would be a better solution, but for questions that only need a little help, encouraging a downvote is bad for the community.

My other concern is that when a user edits a question, one might have the chance to undo a downvote and spare both the penalty. As this is now implemented for questions, the downvoter now has no reason to undo his vote, even if the question was appropriately edited to become valuable by the poster. The poster does not deserve to have a permanently binding negative rep simply because there's no reason to undo the negative vote.

Answer 14

When I was pushing to get 10k, and then 20k, I rationed my downvotes. Now that I'm well over 20k, I'm less inclined to do so. One might argue that this is an intended consequence: high-rep users are the people whose judgement you trust, and they are also the people most likely to shrug off the -1 charge.

In other words, the question here is whether you are trying to incent more downvotes from those further down the rep curve. If so, I think that making them free is a fine idea.

To me, the more valuable change would be to make the downvote penalty even closer to the upvote benefit. I know that 'sympathy' has been blown upon as a statistically valid concept, but my impression is that there is a class of questions where downvotes attract upvotes, and the disparity mounts up. This is not an issue for truly awful questions, but rather for bikesheds. I wonder if it's just pointless to try to downvote those as opposed to the close/delete cycle.

Answer 15

I think it sounds like an excellent change.

As you've said, Jeff, people are very keen to vote on answers, but questions get short shrift, which is odd because the quality of questions matters a lot.

Although in theory we care about quality, not rep (ours or theirs), the fact is that as humans we do associate value with rep and (as @Anna said), we tend to hold onto something we value.

The other thing about downvoting is that you can undo it if the question improves. I'll tend to hold off voting to close, waiting (usually in vain) for the OP to correct the problem, because I can't undo that (not 'till the question is actually closed and I can vote to reopen it).

I've been trying to remind myself to vote on questions anyway, and with this change, I'd be much more likely to vote questions down when appropriate.

It might also have a knock-on effect on voting questions up, because you get in the mindset of voting on questions. Which would be a very good thing.

---

Update: This question lead me to make this separate suggestion (which is complementary, not meant as a replacement; I like the idea suggested here regardless of my new suggestion either way). Basically it's a direct approach: Remind people to vote on questions (when they vote on answers), since people vote on answers more than questions. See the link for (er, some) details. Edit: Hans Passant tells me that this has just been implemented and will be documented here in the next couple of days. Classic case of someone else having my good idea first. I've deleted the feature request I made here.

Update 2: I was just coming back to suggest that this free downvote thing should be something one has to earn (with a fairly modest rep, say a couple of hundred, perhaps as much as 500; not much more) and see that @systempuntoout has just suggested that. So, um, me too. :-) @Jeff reminded me elsewhere that you need 125 rep to downvote at all. So a separate threshold for free downvotes is probably unnecessary and confusing.

Answer 16

Would starting questions with a positive value affect how people vote?

• Questions start with a vote value of +1 and question poster gets their +5 rep (awarded after a delay?)
• First downvote incurs no penalty to the voter and incurs -5 to the question poster

Psychologically, you're not penalising the question poster - you're just removing rep they don't deserve. So, good questions get positive votes, mediocre ones get zero and really bad ones go to negative/close/deletion.

The above solution is probably not the right one, but I think the general idea has merit. You want to motivate people to vote, so state that condition X means good, set the default as something else and wait for people's someone on the internet is wrong gene to kick in.

Possible issues with the solution as stated:

• complaints over race conditions that incur -1 rep for 2nd+ downvotes
• additional complexity in implementation and for users
• additional batch jobs
• requires the user base to be proactive and not accept +1 is the new 0

Answer 17

I question whether downvoting on questions actually works. Great questions should be rewarded, sure - but most poor-quality questions I see come from users with so little reputation they literally cannot lose any, or their behavior indicates they don't understand or don't care about the reputation system anyway. So a negative number is a helpful indicator to others that the question might need help, but does it really affect the asker's behavior?

Answer 18

It's a nice idea, but I'm not sure it would be great to give everyone this right; maybe this should be a privilege, something that needs x amount of reputation to unlock. In the end, reputation is a way of measuring how trusted a person is; someone that's trusted would have more authority to cast judgement on a question.

Answer 19

As I said on meta.Serverfault, if you're going to do this, it should be combined with the new "10 votes for question only" pool of votes.

For those 10 votes, take away the cost of downvoting and/or add +1 rep for every up or down vote. Having to first vote on 30 other questions or answers should be enough of a hurdle to get over that not too many people will randomly vote 30 times and then vote on 10 questions just to get 10 rep per day.

Answer 20

To be honest, the need for down-votes to have an up-front cost (when up-votes, flags, and every other "voting" mechanism doesn't) seemed counter-productive, so I'd support this change.

However, right now, there's not much of a value proposition to voting up, and a negative cost to voting down. While removing the negative cost is great, there's still no reason to vote constructively, besides a mostly abstract idea of my vote potentially contributing to the greater good of the site or for a couple of badges.

Vote or the kitten gets it: okay, that's fine. But it doesn't really matter how I vote, does it? I can blindly vote 30 times on 30 random questions and have fulfilled my civic duty, at least according to the letter of the law.

Giving down-votes a cost (while letting up-votes be free) isn't the solution, but there has to be something to assign meaning or value to question voting besides the prompts and blog posts to get people to vote.

(My poorly thought-out idea to address that is in this answer's revision log).

Answer 21

Why not make it so that downvotes cost -1 rep, but the penalty is removed or offset by posting a follow-up comment on the question explaining the vote? This way the comment is not required (which isn't a popular idea) but there is incentive to help improve the question (or answer).

If people care enough about their rep that a 1 point reduction prevents them from downvoting, maybe they would care enough to give a reasoned explanation for their vote?

Answer 22

I've always thought the reputation loss was a good thing. You just have to look at previous answers to similar questions to see that a fair size of people did too.

It's kind of like a meanness tax.

Seriously though how about trying to fix this in another way. Say for every 5 question upvotes somebody gives putting a message saying.

"You've upvoted 5 questions in a row. Have you not seen any bad questions in this time. The community needs downvotes too"

Edit Do you guys really need a reward to do the right thing? Sure losing rep hurts but generally only because you lose privileges.

I still think that the only way to get the desired behaviour is to let people know what the desired behaviour is.

Answer 23

Are you gonna do another rep recalc to "reverse" the previous downvotes?