Do we want to discourage pity votes on awful questions?

Question

In the answers and comments to this question the idea of discouraging the pity upvotes that awful questions usually get has been mentioned more than once, but, as it is tangential to the issue discussed there I wanted to move it here.

So, three things:

1. Do we want discourage pity upvoting?
2. If we want to, how could that be achieved?
3. Should we encourage closing of awful questions? How?

Various considerations:

• If we managed to effectively discourage pity upvoting then lousy questioners would have a harder time getting reputation.
• If less people upvote unnecessarily, less people follow suit upvoting (the train effect which has been documented somewhere around here) and may even increase the percentage of closing that kind of questions get.
• The system would be more fair.
• It may not be doable in a practical way.
• It may not be worth it as it's not a big deal.
• In the end, it will get sorted out by the community.

Answer 1

The way to avoid pity upvotes is not to downvote for no reason. The way I see it: either a question needs to be closed/deleted or it doesn't. A lot of people seem to downvote questions that need to be closed. Why bother? If it's spam you can flag it for moderator attention. Otherwise let it be closed and possibly deleted in due course.

If it's a valid question and for whatever reason you just don't like it, your downvote has a reasonable chance of attracting an upvote.

I know I've seen plenty of questions downvoted that were simply poorly worded or formatted and a simple edit would fix them.

Perhaps we should be asking: if the question doesn't need to be closed, why are you downvoting it?

Answer 2

What is going to constitute an "invalid" up-vote?

There is always going to be an element of counter-culture in a group. If you express that something is bad, there will always be someone to say "oh, it's not as bad as that." So you down-vote, they up-vote. That is the way of things.

So you want to pick out when votes are "valid" expressions of someone's opinion? Some voters have different motivations. The idea that you are going to somehow tell the differnece is folly and dangerous.

But, don't panic. Stack Overflow has a large population of voters. In the end, the overall vote will reflect the substance and quality of the content. There's no need to somehow filter out the small amount of noise in either up-votes or down-votes.

Answer 3

As one possible means to address this, I'm going to repeat (slightly paraphrased) an answer I gave to another question along similar lines.

One way to mitigate this would be to show upvotes and downvotes separately, as suggested in this feature request. That would allow people to see when someone has earned decent rep from an answer (or question) that otherwise appears to have a small vote total, and use that in the decision of whether to cast their own vote or not.

I always remember that my votes are limited, and information like this could be of great use in my decision-making process. I might be less inclined to spend a "pity vote" on someone who's already earned, say 24 rep (+30, -6) just to get them from showing -1 to 0.

Also, I'd like to add that this information is already available, if you care to browse to the OP's user profile and view their reputation tab. So it's not confidential. I just think having it more obvious could help the voting process work more effectively, particularly in cases like these.

Oh, and to get this done I'd advocate denormalizing upvote/downvote data as cletus suggested in response to Jeff's answer so that this isn't an undue strain on the database.

Answer 4

I think the community already frowns upon pity upvoting. However, how could one achieve any kind of serious discouragement? I suppose we could pop a warning box if someone upvotes a question that's at a negative score? I don't think that's a particularly good solution -- in many cases, a decent answer can get down to -1 or even -2 before it starts getting its upvotes due entirely to weird drive-by downvoters.

Maybe pop the warning box on a -[some threshold] answer? What would the box say? Perhaps something like:

It looks like you've upvoted an unpopular answer. Consider writing a comment to explain why.

It's conceivable, but I don't like it. Too intrusive.

I think the only answer that would really be workable is to place something in the FAQ. But right now, the FAQ is short and sweet -- I'm not sure I want to content creep that too much, either. :)

To be completely honest, I'm not even sure that pity upvoting is a real "problem." Yes, I'm sure it happens, just as I'm sure some users go on downvoting rampages against others. That said, if it's not rampant, and others in the community will downvote the question/answer anyway, why worry?

Finally, anonymous (non-commented) voting means that people can vote, for whatever reason they choose, whichever way they choose. It applies to downvoting, and it applies to upvoting. The community will, eventually, sort it out.