Make voting activity on your posts available on site metas (what you would get from rep if metas had rep)

Question

Child metas don't have rep, so there's no point in tracking a rep stat or reporting changes. But one of the things rep updates do on main sites is to alert me when there's activity on older posts. On metas, unless I revisit a question I'll never notice that there's been a bunch of voting (which might be accompanied by new comments that didn't ping me). I'd like to know about that activity, not because of any ego reasons but because meta is where site policies get discussed and set and it's useful to know about changes in the community will. A couple days ago I visited a meta post where, a few weeks ago, my answer had been voted down, and this time it was at the top.

Could we have something like the reputation-changes tab on meta?

I suspect that the data already exists, because I once got a Mortarboard badge on a per-site meta (and I see I'm not the only one). If something akin to reputation is already being tracked internally on per-site metas, can we get it exposed?

Answer 1

Yes, please.

It's useful to know how your questions/answers are being voted on the child metas. Votes are feedback, and right now, this feedback isn't explicitly shown to the user. If we need to know if some of our posts got voted up/down, we need to visit the user profile and then check the scores. This is pretty annoying.

Instead of the reputation change, we could have something like this:

The text could of course be changed to something more interesting instead of UV/DV, if needed. I'm not sure how to deal with the case where there's both upvotes and downvotes on a single post, though.

The basic idea remains the same — include the voting details in the Achievements dropdown so we don't have to go to the child Meta site to check.

Answer 2

Update: I've built a new voting activity tool, you can read about it there or just go ahead and check it yourself.

You can now track your voting activity on per-site metas! Here's a screenshot:

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This is how I want to see it.

I think votes should be neither green nor red, because they don't affect your reputation.

So if you were downvoted, display "-1", if you were upvoted two times, display "+2".

Also, "total score" would be great:

And highlight achievements indicator, as if you got a badge.

Answer 3

The current behavior makes it all about reputation, which is stupid and not what it should be about.

The really interesting information is that someone voted up (or down) your post, that other people found your post helpful or interesting, agree or disagree with your post. But the supercollider popdown doesn't provide this information, it is obsessed with the reputation points you get from it. As soon as you don't get reputation from a vote it deems it worthless and uninteresting.

But the interesting thing is that someone voted on your post, that you might have gotten reputation from it is just a bonus. The dropdown has to stop making it all about reputation and instead should show what everybody really wants to know: How other people voted on our posts.

Answer 4

^{This follows the lines of James’s answer, but hopefully goes one step further.}

Summary: Top-bar notifications about meta voting activity should be introduced to boost meta participation by gamification.

Stack Exchange is powered by knowing that you received upvotes, i.e., that people found your contributions helpful or similar. Knowing that I received an upvote makes me happy; knowing that I received a downvote makes me at least reevaluate what I am doing and thus hopefully allows me to improve myself (and in particular my answering capabilities). In addition, votes on old posts sometimes make me revisit the post and see it under a new light, possibly improve it or see whether and why it’s been bumped (which often happens along with upvotes).

Now, many per-site-metas receive ridiculously little attention from the site’s regular users. While it’s impossible for me to prove this, I think the lack of information on up- and downvotes plays a huge part in this. People do not feel that contributing on Meta is any good and people do not receive an occasional reminder (whenever one of their posts is voted on) that Meta exists, prompting them to take a look at recent activity or just reminding them that they can discuss certain issues there by asking a new question.

Now, some might argue that people should not participate in Meta for upvotes or other rewards, but to make the site better. While I do not think that people will contribute because they actively want to get these notifications, my main reply to this is: So what? If somebody makes good contributions to Meta just to see upvotes, they still make good contributions to Meta – mission accomplished. Also, remember that the entirety of Stack Exchange lives of the fact that people cannot only help other people in a well-organised way, but receive reputation for it (gamification). Why should metas be excempt from this?

The above mainly stems from my experience from smaller sites. Maybe this feature is not so much needed for this reason on, e.g., Meta Stack Overflow.

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Finally, I cannot refrain from stating that I find it quite annoying that I have to check my meta posts manually to see if I received any votes.

Answer 5

What I really miss, and what acted as a medium for this exact behavior was the old "profileLink" popout. The one where you hovered your name, and it showed your recent rep changes, badges, voting, all that jazz.

When the topbar came out, I kept that functionality with a user script. However, the profileLink popout has since been completely removed (about 6-8 weeks ago) and I cannot provide a screenshot to it.

The popout contained a count of +n votes for recent posts, votes per day, week, and month - in meta. Instead of these values being combinations of 10's,5's,2's, and other numbers, they were all only 1. Although there was no reputation indication, it was very helpful for looking at recent voting activity on my meta posts to see what was and was not active.

I would like to see this feature returned for all users in some fashion. Apparently hover is no longer "in" because mobile users cannot hover. But now that they have their own experience, it makes no sense to deprive mouse users (honestly, they are probably a massive majority) hover opportunities.

Even if the hover functionality of access is not restored, the tool itself should be available somewhere to inspect. It provided a per site breakdown all in 1 place which was very convenient, and for metas, that information is not available anywhere else.

Answer 6

Here's a page that displays your Meta stats and can track differences.

It uses localStorage to keep a record between browser sessions and highlights any changed values. For example this user just got an upvote on that raised a question's score from 7 to 8:

(Click for larger image)

The page also takes URL parameters, EG:

http://jsbin.com/ximuhuzo/1?poll=no&interval=77&sitename=meta.stackoverflow&userid=2963652

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Please note:

• Currently, the saved baseline is updated every time data is fetched.
  So, if polling is enabled, the change highlighting will only appear for one poll interval.
  This will be the next thing I change if I make any enhancements to this page/app.
• The Last "Active" date-time values are currently raw Unix time from the API. I'll format them in the next release.
• For now, current totals are shown rather than delta values.

Answer 7

There are two places in the UI where this information could be provided, and existing answers discuss both of them. These are the top-bar notifications and the meta profile.

I know that there has been reluctance to provide what some consider to be "noise" in the top-bar notifications; this is the argument against alerting people to received downvotes. For whatever reason, people want to limit what goes into that notification area.

But that's ok in this case. The request is to make the information available, not necessarily to push it at people in real time, so adding a tab to the meta profile for meta votes, as suggested in this answer, would address the need. It's pretty important that this tab "light up" in some way when there are changes, like the counters for favorites and rep (on main); it doesn't matter too much what form that takes. It could be a "virtual rep" count or actual vote counts or just a little blue¹ UI thingie that indicates "something new here".

The information is almost certainly already being tracked, as noted in the question (else how would meta Mortarboards be possible?), so this change would just be to expose the data. Because meta doesn't have a "reputation" tab, adding a "received votes" tab would not make the design too wide -- a slot is available. It should be possible to reuse most of the design from main-site profiles.

Bottom line: I propose adding a tab to the meta profile and not changing the top-bar notifications.

¹ Or whatever the color is on your site.

Answer 8

Where to notify us

Logically, just use the "Recent inbox messages" on the top bar.

If it's ok for comments, badges, all other stuffs, then fine/logical also for:
"You got an upvote on Meta, question [link]", or downvote, or comment, etc.

Meta upvote notifications - Meh

I don't so much care about the upvotes.
It matters not because when I post an answer I believe it's a good one and someone will get use from it, otherwise I wouldn't post it.

I therefore don't really need to know about upvotes to have this confirmed, just downvotes so I know it was contradicted!

That said, while I check back in if I have a question on the go, it'd still be useful to not have to manually check back on my question to see if people agreed/disagreed, or did/didn't like the feature-request idea.

Meta downvote notifications - Yeh

Not only would I like to know when someone downvoted my answer or question, but this is required if the site wants people to go back and improve their answer or question, or continue the info flow.

While stack is a Q&A, the Metas are often a little more discussion based, and are never really a hit and run scenario, whether posting an answer or question.
One likes to check back to see others opinion of your question or answer.

For answers, a poor answer is detrimental to the site in general, we should be notified to be able to do something about it - improve it etc.
Perhaps someone downvoted and disagreed. I need to know so I can go debate their response, or agree with them, and either way update my answer to reflect this and thus provide a decent answer to a question for future reference for all other users.

For questions, I obviously need to know, as positive or negative votes tells me if I'm right or wrong, or have a point, or whatever.

Stopping users continuing to participate

It feels a bit, weird, scary in fact, popping back to a meta question and seeing all kinds of activity going on which I was not aware of.
I can currently only avoid this and continue to participate by manually going back there, and this is not practical.

Debates might have skipped several topics in the time I had not checked back, and as such probably too late for me to make comments or suggestions (without loads of comments playing catch up..).

Also, if people are doing this, as they don't get auto notified, then they're wasting time checking their previous Meta answers/questions and thus not spending that time helping out elsewhere.

Necessity?

I think this is something we need rather than want.

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Now, how do I know if someone agreed with this or not...I know, I'll leave a tab open and come back now and then :(