A badge that rewards "prophetic" downvoting

Question

How about introducing a badge that rewards downvoting, but only of the sensible kind?

A measure for sensible downvoting would be a high percentage certain number of downvotes on content that has subsequently been

• Deleted
• Closed (except migrations and duplicates)

Bronze, Silver, and Gold badges would vary in numbers, say

Bronze: cast 50 downvotes on content that was subsequently closed or deleted

This would encourage downvoting (which is great and needed), but of the measurably sensible kind only.

What good actual numbers would be for Bronze, Silver, and Gold would be a separate discussion. Feel free to suggest numbers in your answers, as well as name suggestions (the only I managed to come up with was Whistleblowerand that isn't really accurate. I'm more imagining the old lady calling the council over some abandoned litter in the streets, or broken windows... but in a good way of course.

Answer 1

I disagree. Not all that should be downvoted should be closed, and vice versa.

• A question can be very good, well put, well thought-out, but is off-topic, or not constructive.
• A question can be valid, but badly formatted, or research wasn't applied to it ("RTFM questions which aren't duplicates"). There's no reason to close, only downvote.

Also

• You're encouraging gang-voting, people see a close (4) question and rush to downvote it before it gets closed.

Answer 2

I really don't like this "accuracy percent" idea; you're basically discouraging people from downvoting on bad but not closable posts; there are lots of ways your post can be bad but not outright closable.

It's also often the case that a good answer salvages a poor question, or a poor question is kept around because it's popular. It doesn't make sense that I should have to save up my downvotes only for stuff I know is going to be closed, or be locked out of a badge forever because 50% of my 400 downvotes aren't on closed posts.

Alternately I can see this being useful if it's instead downvote X number, not percent, of posts that go on to be closed. There you keep the idea of "accurate downvotes" without the problems % based badges have (hello Unsung Hero).

Answer 3

I don't like the idea. I downvote questions because they're bad (and it's the only way to fix them), not because I get a badge. Gamification is good and all, but my reasons for downvoting is because something deserves it, not because I'd get a badge. Voting really needs to be a civic thing more than anything else.

Answer 4

Prophet of Doom

50 downvotes on posts that are later:

• Deleted
• Closed (except migrations and duplicate)

Many duplicates are good questions, but just use different keywords.

Doomsayer

500 downvotes

Pale Horse Rider

5000 downvotes

Answer 5

I like it, and if it's applied retrospectively I'd probably get the Gold variant on every site I participate, I'm particularly proud of my deletion instincts and I do feel that down voters are excluded from badges. We need some badges to award our garbage collectors, people!

That said I wouldn't feel right earning the badge on Programmers, where I'm a moderator, as all I'd have to do would be down vote every post I delete, just before I delete it. And I don't know how complicated this will get if we add an extra constraint to exclude down votes on posts you've later deleted.

Answer 6

I like this proposal, seems useful to promote the usage of down-voting, but some considerations have to be made since when down-voting we are stating that:

This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful (click again to undo)

So, the down-vote alone will start being used even if the question demonstrates efforts from the user to achieve is goal.

It is necessary to consider that questions may get closed by being exact duplicates or off topic, that doesn't necessarily mean that the user haven't sweated to try to solve the issue:

exact duplicate

This question covers exactly the same content as earlier questions on this topic; its answers may be merged with another identical question.

off topic

Questions on Stack Overflow are expected to relate to programming or software development within the scope defined in the FAQ. Consider editing the question or leaving comments for improvement if you believe the question can be reworded to fit within the scope. Read more about closed questions here.

I like this solution if practicably applied to situations where the down-voter gets rewards if the question gets closed under this grounds:

not constructive

As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or specific expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, see the FAQ for guidance.

not a real question

It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. For help clarifying this question so that it can be reopened, see the FAQ.

Questions closed by `too localized` option

This is grounds for a deeper discussion, but my first choice would be to exclude the awards on this topic.

---

Deleted questions should reward the down-voters since if the question got deleted, the community agrees that it was a really a bad question!

See the FAQ, where it reads:

Questions that are extremely off topic, or of very low quality, may be removed at the discretion of the community and moderators.

Answer 7

Your goal of encouraging downvotes when warranted is an excellent one. The trick here is figuring out the "when warranted" clause - how can we separate justified, "honest" downvotes from downvotes submitted merely to game the system?

You propose that a good indicator of a warranted downvote is whether or not the question was, ultimately, rejected (in one way or another). Let's consider this.

Is the "ultimate fate <--> warranted downvote" correlation correct?

Somewhat. In most cases, a post being closed/deleted is ample de facto justification for a downvote. However:

• Downvotes != Close votes. They serve two different functions - sometimes related, sometimes not. There's a huge difference between "this is a lousy, low-quality question but it's firmly on topic and will get reasonable responses" vs. "this is an awesome question, but it needs to be migrated to a different site." So the correlation is far from reliable - and you really don't want to encourage people to start coupling the two too tightly.
• Answer deletion is quite rare. A downvote on an answer is first and foremost an "I disagree" vote; in most such cases, there's no reason for the post to be deleted even if it scores very low. Spam and comments-as-answers are the exception, but they need flagging - not downvotes. So you're really mostly addressing questions here.
• Edge cases. You're going to have a lot of edge cases to contend with here. e.g., You're already limiting your scope to particular close reasons and not others. What about questions that are subsequently reopened? What about questions that are only closed much later? What about questions in the middle of close/open war? etc., etc.

In summary, I like the heuristic you're proposing as a rough estimate of what you're trying to measure, but I'm not sure it translates easily into a formal well-defined badge.

Would this badge promote gaming and abuse?

Oh, yes. You can't take a true measure of what you want - "well-justified downvotes"; if you could, maybe you could automate voting, and you wouldn't need SE :P But what's left is an approximation - which depends on behavior of other people - and which is fairly easy to manipulate.

Just as you're trying to use the result to test the original action, people can choose their actions to aim for the desired result. For example, one could systematically search for questions with low scores or with any close votes (it's right there in the Review panel!...) and downvote them willy-nilly. Or create lousy questions using sockpuppets, and jump in to downvote them. Or downvote lots and lots of new questions, because it's free and some of them are going to be closed.

So your approximation may be useful for academic purposes, but if it's introduced as a badge, it will be extremely easy to game - in ways which will be directly detrimental to the site at large.

Answer 8

I think this is likely to end up being almost the same as the Marshal badge in that you just make sure to downvote any answer/question before you raise a flag on them.

So if these badges would be introduced I'd suggest that there should be some kind of divider between this and the Marshal one so that any posts that you flag and downvote, would only count for one of the badges.

Answer 9

What about:

“being the first person to downvote X number, not percent, of posts that are then downvoted by at least two other people”

Answer 10

Alpha and Ringleader

The problem with this proposal is that it conflates downvoting with voting to close, and while the two are related they're not the same. A badge that rewards downvoting based on whether questions are closed will confuse the two ideas more than they already are.

Badgest that reward accuracy seem like a good idea, so I'd suggest that we modify the proposal so that there's a badge for accurate voting (up or down) and a badge for accurate closing. They'd work like this:

Ringleader: 80% accuracy among first up or down votes on 40 questions. Accuracy means that your vote was followed by 3 or more similar votes.

Alpha: 90% accuracy among first close votes on 40 questions. Accuracy means that the question was closed as a result of your vote.

So, to determine eligibility for Ringleader, you'd look at the last 40 questions where the user in question was first to vote up or down. If their up or down vote was followed by 3 or more similar votes in 80% of the cases, they get the badge. Similarly, for Alpha, you'd look at the last 40 questions where the user was first to vote to close. If the question was closed due in part to their vote 90% of the time, they get the badge.

The idea in each case is to encourage users to vote early, but to carefully consider whether others will follow their lead. You don't want to be the first to vote to close if you're not pretty sure that others will agree.