Was my use of downvote and upvote warranted?

Question

My Understanding of Downvotes and Upvotes

It was my understanding that using downvotes and upvotes was the right way to:

• increase visibility of valid and high-quality answers,
• decrease visibility of invalid or low-quality answers.

I also see downvotes as a temporary measure to encourage improvements. This attempts to decrease their visibility until then and forces their author to rework them. Ultimately, it "buries" them if the crowd so decides, and:

• reduces noise (by pushing them down the thread until they get improved),
• or even suppresses noise (by encouraging their original author to delete them if they know they won't rework them).

In the extreme case where that's not appropriate or not efficient, and where it would be warranted, flagging for moderator attention would be the other approach (extremely bad answers, spam, offensive content and other things that require immediate and radical action).

So, I occasionally add a -1 to a "useless" answer and notify its owner of my reasoning and request an improvement, sometime even mentioning that I'd gladly cancel or invert this downvote afterwards once they do improve their answer. By useless, I mean an answer of poor quality, or, most likely, not adding any value or no new information that would already listed by prior answers.

The Current Case Study

I just did on this SO question, to what seemed, at least to me, good effect. Hopefully this is something you can see that if you had high privileges or mod rights. A good answer was posted by Joachim Pileborg, and a few seconds later a nearly identical one appeared by Carl Norum. However it didn't provide, at the time, any added value.

So I upvoted the good and first one and downvotied the bad one (with an explaining for the downvote in a comment). Of course, this created a shift between the +1-rated answer and the -1-rated answer. As you can imagine, the +1 quickly became a +4. I gad explained my logic to the one I downvoted, and he kindly removed his answer.

This, to me, seemed a very good use of upvotes and downvotes, and the ideal resolution:

• answers without value get deleted,
• both downvoter and downvoter get their "downvotes" points back (I think? not even sure) as the answer gets deleted,
• more votes for top answerer,
• overall quality improves, yay!

And it seems to me like a very good approach, though it's mostly effective if done right at the time when questions are posted and first answers appear. The window of opportunity is very, very small. Afterwards, it is a bit harsh to request a deletion if there's a loss of points involved or an emotional attachment to an answer. Which brings me to another point, and sometimes makes me wonder if voting shouldn't be disallowed - or maybe allowed, but without showing the sum of the votes - for the 10 minutes following the posting. Thus early answers can be fleshed out and improved and it's not a game of "I was first, so the timeshift is in my favor" but of "my answer is actually better, even though I posted it shortly after". Which seems more fitting.

Unfortunately...

Apparently, using the above approach on that question I listed may have pissed off the person whose answer I downvoted (I hope not, and I cannot know for sure as Carl didn't reply afterwards), but it surely looks like I may have pissed off others who feel like I was an *ss for doing so.

So...

I hereby ask confirmation on my behavior...

Mostly... Was what I did good or evil? Was I, essentially, really being an *ass? I don't mind looking like one to others, if I was right in the eye of the sites' maintainers and mods.

Also:

• Could I have done it differently?
• Is it a good use of downvotes and upvotes?
• Would that "no total votes" or "no votes at all" "grace period" be a good idea to encourage this, and make it more fair for good questions to be upvoted and accepted, while sometimes the time shift plays in favor of slightly worse answers, just because first votes came upon them first and it biased next voters?

See also this meta-answer on P.SE (to a different question though) where I originally mentioned the same approach, which I rephrased above for clarity to get more feedback.

Update: So, the general consensus was that I was being an ass or misusing downvotes. Won't do that again and will leave more time before downvoting. Thanks to all for the interesting and constructive discussions.

Answer 1

The general idea in these situations is to just plain use common sense and to assume that people here posting answers to questions are doing so because they intrinsically care about providing value to others by sharing their knowledge and experience in solving problems.

If we take the Theory X style management approach and assume that people are here for bad reasons, everyone loses. But the Theory Y style approach assumes that knowledge workers are intrinsically motivated to do the best they can. Sure, we all love the badges and the reputation and the ability to unlock privileges that give us the ability to help in other ways on the site, but for many, especially users with reputation in the top percentages, the reputation is of little importance.

Thus, when Carl posts his answer it's because he loves programming and software development so much that he chooses to volunteer his time to help others solve problems. Sometimes we end up posting duplicate answers by accident, due to the fact that there are 5.5 million visitors per day on Stack Overflow and the chances that two people post very similar content is quite high.

While maintaining high standards is important, we must also consider the human factor, as that is what drives people like Carl -- the feeling of satisfaction one derives from helping others. An extra answer on a Stack Overflow post is hardly an exceptional circumstance that would bring this community to a grinding halt; thus, as Hovercraft mentions, just ignore the post and move on.

With that said, we don't want people to abuse the system. If it's clear that someone has a track record of posting duplicate answers for the sake of increasing their score, then perhaps that may be worth a second look. But we should never assume people are doing this. It will be obvious if they are because most people who do this first, aren't very smart about it and second, they don't usually put a lot of effort into their answers, which means you'll see a string of low quality one-liner posts.

Just keep in mind what the tooltips say on the upvote and downvote buttons.

• Up: This answer is useful
• Down: This answer is not useful.

And keep in mind that, although two posts may effectively have the same meaning, it's quite possible that the way the other is worded may help a future visitor more quickly understand whatever it is they were confused about. That's why we don't downvote correct answers. :) Hope this helps!

As an aside, I oftentimes volunteer to expand my answers if I see that they repeat something someone else said, regardless of who posted first. This is just something I personally like to do to be more helpful, but I'd hardly say it's required. Just lead by example, and the users with the most potential to be awesome will follow your lead.

Answer 2

You down-vote if the answer is wrong, and particularly if it may be misleading, but not if it "doesn't add any value". If it doesn't add value, then simply don't up-vote it. I don't like to think of down-votes as for "punishing bad ones", but rather for alerting the original poster that this particular answer should not be followed.

For a much better written answer to a similar question, please read Jon Skeet's answer here.

Answer 3

If I see downvotes on an answer that has a non negative score, I usually take this as an indicator of a subtle mistake or error, which may or may not be elaborated on in the comments. Alternatively, the answer might be obsolete, or sub optimal. To summarise, a downvote (at least on SO) most commonly means "Don't do/use this".

Usually, I will re-read the answer more carefully, or avoid it in favor of a more highly voted answer (if one exists). I suspect a not-so-small number of users on SO use the downvote metric similarly.

Unless you plan to post your lengthy explanation in comments each time, downvoting an entirely correct answer might raise confusion and doubts regarding the approach being advocated, which in itself outweighs any benefits you see here (I fundamentally disagree there are any benefits at all, but that is another issue).

Answer 4

As you can see from my comments, I have specific objections to some of the criteria you have used to judge what is downvote worthy. I'm not going to rehash that here as other answers cover that quite well, but if you want to positively contribute to the site you have to stop thinking of downvotes as punitive measures to punish community members or tools to get them to perform specific actions (namely deleting a post).

Don't forget that deletes can contribute to a ban, so encouraging people to delete quick duplicates by downvoting might unintentionally push them towards an answer ban.

In the end, only you can decide what criteria you will use to judge posts, and it is entirely your right to vote however you see fit. Is the answer clearly wrong - please downvote. Does the answer encourage bad practices? Do you dislike someone's name, their coding style, or think they smell bad, go ahead and downvote them as you desire.

But I strongly encourage you to consider the impact of your votes beyond just yourself and the person you downvoted. The simple fact is voting (both upvotes and downvotes) is only designed to relate how useful the community finds a specific answer, nothing more. The other benefits (reputation and the associated privileges) are just fringe benefits to provide incentive to the community to help contribute.

Imagine being a new programmer who comes to the site and sees 2 almost identical answers, one has a few upvotes and one has a single downvote. How is this supposed to help me? Is this solution good or bad? He/she doesn't care about rep-whoring or how far apart the answers were posted, he/she just wants an answer to his problem.

The point is you need to consider others who will read the question in the future and use the upvotes/downvotes to help decide if an answer will solve their problem.