Avoiding Bandwagon Voting-to-Close

Question

I'm somewhat frustrated at the seemingly bandwagon mentality at Stack Overflow with respect to voting sometimes. I've seen a great number of questions voted closed as off-topic, duplicates, etc. without the voters giving them adequate attention, as evidenced by the fact that they aren't actually off-topic, duplicates, etc. if you take the time to read through them. It's as though some users with voting privileges see that others have voted a certain way, and just blindly vote along-side them sometimes.

I'd like to propose that SO stop displaying these votes to you until after you actually vote on it (assuming you ever do). I feel like not displaying this information would force users into giving the question more attention and voting according to their own opinion, rather than promoting bandwagon voting.

Although I disagree with the conclusiveness of the "evidence" cited in it, this post touches on the same concept.

Edit: One such example, as requested: Why does bcmul return a number with a scale different than the one I specified? (Disclaimer: I was the OP).

Answer 1

Your proposal presumes that the reason people cast votes is because other people cast votes, but perhaps people cast votes for legitimate reasons most of the time.

It's worth noting that questions which attract certain kinds of votes are placed in review queues, where community members can add their vote to the tally. So, in a sense, we encourage this sort of behavior. Without it, removing poor questions from the site would be difficult.

There are reasons why this is not a problem. One of the biggest reasons is that the close reasons were refined and clarified, so that they can be used in a more instructive and unambiguous way. This more or less prevents the abuse that might otherwise occur with vague, broadly-specified close reasons that could apply to a wide range of scenarios.

Nowadays, unfair closures are exceedingly rare. They occur when the OP puts too much rant in their question, or their question itself is an edge case. The remedy is to post on Meta, as you just did, and get enough consensus for a reopen, which in fact just occurred.

Answer 2

If there is pile-on and mindless close-voting without reading (a point I don't actually concede) it would be caused more by the review queue than by the existence of the close (2) link at the bottom of the question.

However, the cure for this is to comment: "this isn't actually a dupe because that is about Fortran and this is about APL" or whatever. And vote to reopen if you like. And edit it to clarify and highlight the different aspects of this question.

Closing doesn't have to be permanent, so if something is closed and then reopened again there is no harm done.

Answer 3

The core assumption here overlooks a very important aspect of closing. The close vote review. Although the close vote review queue is large, the first thing a reviewer will see is the most recently asked question with a close vote according to their filter.

This is a contributing factor to closure speed and should not be overlooked. Most questions which are closed do not deserve to be open. And those which do deserve it often are either re-opened or discussed on meta.

Moreover, in the review queue when filtering on a type of closure, users are more likely to choose that same closure reason. While there may be some validity to that being "bandwagoning", people tend to find what they are looking for, and it does not have anything to do with showing the current amount of votes on a question.

When the votes are shown in the close vote review queue, they are not always the same as users tend to choose what they feel fits the question most accurately. Is it a perfect process? No. But I do not believe that showing the counts affects the process negatively.

All that being said, when a close vote specifically for duplicate is showing in a comment, other users will generally be more inclined to agree than to fully analyze. I believe this stems from a reluctance to post duplicate answers, although it will still happen.

As a result of that inclination, when someone points out that your question is a duplicate, and you believe it is not, you must be attentive to that and explicitly define how your question is unique.

In the exact case you link, it is true that you show in your question that you are not interested in the "number_format" (which is the answer in the linked duplicate - although this was reopened, the linked duplicate (confused by PHP's bcmul() scale) was what started this post here on meta), you must make sure to specifically say that your question is not a duplicate of the other post for that exact reason if you want to be fully transparent about the issue.

In conclusion, I do not believe that the vote count leads to bandwagoning - whether it is shown in the review or on the post. I do believe that being attentive will allow your question to remain open and that being attentive is a key part of communication.

P.S. - Closing as duplicate can take some inspection at times, even to familiar users. Perhaps voting to close as duplicate could require at least a score of 5 in one of the tags shared by both the parent and eligible child duplicate.