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Questions that are highly downvoted do not show on the main page. That's generally a good thing.

  • is the absolute score to be shown/not shown different on meta than on main sites?
  • does meta take into account the total number of votes?

Consider a question on SO with no upvotes and 8 downvotes. It's almost certainly crap. Even if it has 1 upvote, maybe that's from a friend or sock of the OP. I want it pushed off the front page.

Now consider a question on meta with no upvotes and 8 downvotes. Perhaps it's just an awful question or idea. Could be. How about one with 50 upvotes and 60 downvotes? That's a great question, in my opinion. It has drawn a lot of attention and is probably hashing out something important. Among the answers or comments may be a great idea for making the trilogy better. I wouldn't want that post suppressed.

Will it be? Should it be? Are the rules in fact different and if they're not, well I think perhaps they should be. For example that a post with a net score low enough to be suppressed will still be shown if it has 10 upvotes, no matter how many down.

(Yes, inspired by Dealing with the weeds that are comments on Stack Overflow which is at -10 as I type, and appears to have fallen off, which is a shame because even if I don't want comments to auto-delete, I think talking about obsolete comments is useful.)

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  • As in "not featured on the front page"? Yes. As in "nobody will see it anymore"? From experience, no. Meta is low-traffic enough that even such questions tend to get their attention. And users seem to be more likely to look further than the front page.
    – Bart
    May 13, 2013 at 17:33
  • @Bart is that yes/no it's different, or yes/no it will be suppressed? My apologies for asking different questions in the title and body, about to edit
    – Kate Gregory
    May 13, 2013 at 17:34
  • I believe the score is -5 on SO proper for questions to disappear from the front page. But I don't think Meta's functioning, besides the different score, differs from SO. But my argument was more that Meta in itself is different enough that users will look beyond the front page for content. So even significantly downvoted content will still get its viewers, even when not prominently featured any more.
    – Bart
    May 13, 2013 at 17:38
  • It seems to me the real answer is to upvote my question to get it above -8. Not that I'm biased, mind you.
    – George Stocker
    May 13, 2013 at 17:40

1 Answer 1

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  • Yes, the threshold is different. According to this answer, the threshold on meta sites is -8, compared to -4 for regular sites.
  • It doesn't sound like the total number of votes is taken into account, just the net score.
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