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I've read that you can change your vote after something you've voted on has been edited. I didn't find any discussion about how you would know an item you voted on had been edited.

Does this functionality exist? Should it?

How often are questions/answers with votes edited? Would it be too much noise?

There is some discussion specific to someone who's been downvoted having the ability to notify the downvoter that the item has been edited:

Allow an edit to notify downvoters: “I think I've fixed the issue now - please check”

Feature request: @Downvoter sends a notification to all downvoters for your post

That's not the point of my question, what if you've upvoted an item and that item is changed in a way that you wouldn't have voted for?

Rather than giving the user who was downvoted the access to contact the downvoter (even if the downvoter remains anonymous),

I'm thinking of an automatic notification.

Clarification:
This is about having useful questions and correct answers that are indicated as being useful or correct by the votes that are applied (both up and down).

Is the work involved in implementing this feature worth the effort?
Is the time required by members to go check the result of an edit worth their time?
Would such a feature have a noticeable effect on the accuracy and usefulness of the information available on the site?

Update:
@Jirka Hanika mentioned the Favorites functionality, it seems like that might be a good model. If you go to your user page and a favorite has been updated, the favorites tab indicates that something has been updated. You can click on it and sort by activity to see the latest items that have changed.

@Jav_Rock pointed out that edits will more likely make a question better rather than worse and suggested limiting notifications to those edits made within an hour of the original post.

As a way of reducing the noise caused by edit notifications, they could be limited to:
Edits on questions/answers that you've down voted.
Edits by the original poster.
Edits made within a limited time frame after the original post.

Additional question:
You can change your vote after something you've voted on has been edited.
What's the point of having that functionality if you don't know that something been edited?

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

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  • 8
    I feel the same way about this, but it may be too much noise as you said...
    – jackJoe
    Jun 12, 2012 at 8:17
  • 1
    Perhaps if it was something you had to opt in for it might be useful. That way you could vote, tick the box and then if the post edited change your vote. However, I do see it as more useful for down-votes rather than up.
    – ChrisF Mod
    Jun 12, 2012 at 8:27
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    See also: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/83343/… for an opt-in alternative.
    – Shog9
    Jun 12, 2012 at 8:29
  • The opt-in sounds like a great idea, though it looks like that suggestion hasn't received a lot of attention. @Shog9, your post is encouraging as far as a way of sending the notices.
    – codewaggle
    Jun 12, 2012 at 8:37
  • Duplicate: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2305/…
    – user102937
    Jun 12, 2012 at 15:23
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    @Robert Harvey - The post you linked to: link is a discussion about being notified when your "own" post is edited. This question is about being notified when someone "else's" post (that you voted on) is edited. Not a duplicate.
    – codewaggle
    Jun 12, 2012 at 19:13
  • True, but the dynamics are essentially the same. Some people still want to get notified when one of their posts is edited, whether it's preemptive or suggestive.
    – user102937
    Jun 12, 2012 at 19:17
  • @Robert Harvey - The technology of sending a notification could be the same in both cases. This question concerns whether or not it would be a worthwhile addition to the site's usefulness and accuracy to add this feature. Being notified that your post was changed seems to me to have less to do with the quality and accuracy of the site and more to do with someone's ego about their post being modified.
    – codewaggle
    Jun 12, 2012 at 19:23
  • Someone's ego??
    – user102937
    Jun 12, 2012 at 19:25
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    From the answer on that page by @Jeff Atwood - "I think it will lead to a lot of edit wars. You, sir, had the audacity to edit my post? In reality you should not care if others edit your posts...". I would interpret that to mean "Ego" based edit wars and I think he's got it right. I need to get back to work, was doing a quick look in here. I've made my case, if people think it's a duplicate, it will be closed as a duplicate, nothing more for me to do here.
    – codewaggle
    Jun 12, 2012 at 19:31
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    I admit I down vote the ever loving crap out of stuff because it is crap! My vote ratio is 1:1.5 up to down! I would have more rep than Skeet if I didn't down vote as much as I do! :-) I would really love to go back and remove those down votes or change them to up votes for questions and answers that were edited or modified to make them not crap if I only knew they were changed A single notification in the little box that said "(3) things you voted on were changed". You click on it and get a list of them. If they look worthy of reconsidering you go look at them, easy peasy.
    – user148287
    Jul 14, 2012 at 5:34
  • I tried something related a while ago - good to see that your proposal is getting traction.
    – assylias
    Dec 18, 2012 at 23:33
  • I would like to see this feature for close votes in order to get questions reopened when they deserve to.
    – NGLN
    Jan 21, 2013 at 23:20
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    Similar to: Allow me to get notifications on specific down-voted questions
    – Flow
    Feb 20, 2013 at 9:29
  • Yes! And it should be a user choice
    – user308037
    Dec 5, 2016 at 14:30

5 Answers 5

Reset to default
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You can now follow a question you've just voted on. This will notify you of edits and comments to the post.

Details are here: The Follow Questions and Answers feature is now live across the Network

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I find it interesting for the case of downvotes as the question is more likely to improve than to get worse. The problem is the increase of notifications on every edit.

A possible solution could be that edits on downvoted posts are notified (to downvoters) only within the next hour. That way you are given the OP the oportunity to improve its post and get downvotes removed within an hour with the guaranty that the downvoters will get notified.

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    This seems like a good way to limit the noise, though I think that an hour might be too limited of a time frame. Maybe a longer time frame with notifications limited to edits by the original poster?
    – codewaggle
    Sep 14, 2012 at 7:23
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    I like the opt-in idea of "Allow me to get notifications on specific down-voted questions" a bit better.
    – Flow
    Feb 20, 2013 at 9:30
  • Maybe use rate-limiting, instead of time-limiting? I see a typical use case like "Written, got downvoted... oh, voter has a point; but enough for today, I'll make it more clear tomorrow."
    – Volker Siegel
    Jun 5, 2014 at 15:09
  • Good, but not an hour, more like a day. I'm in Italy, you are in Australia, she's in Hong Kong..
    – user308037
    Dec 5, 2016 at 14:31
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It would be too much noise; imagine up to 40 notifications per day (or multiple notifications per vote). Most edits are quite minor (tags, typos).

I can see this being useful if it were hidden in a menu somewhere and only significant changes (~50% of the post body changed), and even then maybe only for downvotes (I can't re-upvote an even-more-better post I already upvoted, and I can Favorite to subscribe to posts I really like) but even then it doesn't sound entirely necessary given the volume of voting/posts on some sites.

Perhaps more relevant would be a list of questions you voted to close that have been significantly edited, but again IMO this should be hidden in a menu; for moderators the closed post count might be dozens per day on sites like SO.

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I'm suggesting an intermediate path: add a tab to the MultiCollider SuperDropdown. That way, people who do care about revisiting downvoted posts after they have been edited can do so, while those who don't will only be exposed to a small button they don't want to click.

I guess posts should be ordered by time of latest edit, most recent ones first. A circle indicating the number of unreviewed posts would feel desirable to me, but it probably should be suppressed once it exceeds two-digit numbers (i.e. for users who probably doesn't care), and it almost certainly shouldn't be printed next to the closed the way comments and other notifications are. People who care will see the circled number in the tab button once they open the DropDown.

Both for ease-of-use as well as for the sake of consistency, edits from all Stack Exchange sites should be collected into that single list.

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  • +1 I was going to suggest a separate tab on your profile page "voted" (short for "edits to questions and answers you have voted on") instead, or as well. No noise at all unless you specifically visit that tab, or its associated RSS feed.
    – tripleee
    Jan 22, 2013 at 7:03
  • @tripleee, I considered the same thing, and actually think both would be good. I wanted to post one suggestion first, to see what response it gets. Please post that profile page suggestion, and I'll upvote that one too.
    – MvG
    Jan 22, 2013 at 7:10
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I would argue that this feature is rarely needed in relation to the total amount of voting traffic.

When a post is downvoted, the voter loses a symbolic amount reputation. The recommended way of using downvoting is to clarify the reason for downvoting by a comment (if it isn't already obvious), come back after a while, and review the other traffic at the post and possibly change the vote. This traffic includes edits, comments, alternative answers, and so on. If I am ever making a drastic edit in response to a downvoter's comment, I am using a comment to notify the author of the comment and maybe explain parts of the post that I chose NOT to edit. At the end of the process the downvote may be undone, reputation of both cooperating parties restored, and good lessons learned.

This does not work perfectly when there are many downvotes on presumably similar grounds, but when that happens, there are many page views and it should be easy to quickly accummulate upvotes to compensate. It is also possible to delete the answer and start afresh if the original version was that bad.

When a post is upvoted and then edited, hopefully the edit has made it better, not worse most of the time.

Clarification:

People going back to favorite or otherwise tagged posts is a very common current practice. There is a way of reviewing recent edits to favorites but not an explicit notification mechanism.

Note also that an edit of a post automatically bumps it for everyone including downvoters.

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  • I've struck out the sentence about downvoters in my question and clarified that my question has to do with the quality of the site content rather than concerns about whether someone earns or loses reputation points.
    – codewaggle
    Jun 12, 2012 at 9:55
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    @codewaggle - I see reputation and badges solely as a motivational tool for improving site content. However, an additional opt-in based notification feature would be nice; maybe not restricted to upvotes and downvotes, but also usable with "zero-because" non-votes. Favorites, maybe?
    – Jirka Hanika
    Jun 12, 2012 at 10:00
  • I agree that opt-in would be the best approach.
    – codewaggle
    Jun 12, 2012 at 10:21
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    So being notified about edits to downvoted posts is too much noise, but regularly revisiting them independent of whether or not they have been edited is recommended practice? Seems to me that these revisits are much more work than dealing with the noise, at least if you don't imply a very tight limit for how long and often you're going to revisit posts.
    – MvG
    Jan 21, 2013 at 15:34
  • @MvG - I'm never recommending regular revisits of non-edited pages. I'm recommend a revisit if notified via an accompanying comment. I was also suggesting to use the "recent edits to favorites" feature, which now works differently, but is still usable as long as you are willing to "favorite" a post that you just downvoted on (your choice). You get your favorites sorted by recent edits.
    – Jirka Hanika
    Jan 22, 2013 at 8:27

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