On Meta, Downvotes signify disagreement and not necessarily low quality
So if an answer or question got downvoted on Meta - should the owner remove it or leave it? And is there a difference for questions and answers?
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Sign up to join this communityOn Meta, Downvotes signify disagreement and not necessarily low quality
So if an answer or question got downvoted on Meta - should the owner remove it or leave it? And is there a difference for questions and answers?
I have asked (successfully) for one of my answered questions to be deleted. It was a bad (silly) idea, and it was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, so it was no great loss to the site to have it deleted.
Many ideas are not intrinsically bad, but the community rejects them anyway. For those questions, I think it makes more sense to keep them as a record of what the community thinks of a particular idea -- it avoids our having to rehash discussions in the future, as re-proposals of the same idea can be closed as a duplicate.
Does a restaurant remove unpopular cuisines from its menu? No, there are many opinions and there is room for all of them.
As long as some people agree with you there's really no need to "hide your shame" by deleting the post.
Also, even a downvoted feature request might still have some value and eventually get implemented.
Of course, if you get ten downvotes and zero upvotes the above isn't relevant and most likely there's no point leaving it around but I am referring to the common case of mixed voting resulting in a negative score.
If the UI allows me to delete it, and if deleting my post is what I want to do, that's what I would do.
About 'bad quality' vs 'disagreement':
I would feel free to delete when I believe a post is of low quality and there's not much I can really do to fix it. Why add to the noise by keeping it around? (Although, I expect meta posts are usually of good quality, because people who turn up here are more likely to care about quality)
I would feel free to delete when I see that the community dislikes my idea in general. Why add to the noise by keeping it around?
Now, if I see a reasonable negative score on this answer, I'll delete it because its clearly bad advice. Why add to the noise by keeping it around?