Why aren't people downvoting this post they clearly think is bad? [closed]

Question

This answer illustrates something I find bizarre.

My (borderline rude) comment there has accrued 82 upvotes in less than 4 months and reads as follows:

Why in the world does this have 159 upvotes? It's just a copy and paste, without a link or version number, from some old version of the jQuery source. It's not even usable without copying more stuff from jQuery than is shown here, because it refers to multiple other jQuery properties and methods. This is a completely worthless answer.

Meanwhile, the answer I was commenting on - which has existed for over 4 years - has a mere 22 downvotes.

I can't make sense of this. A quick Fermi estimate based on these numbers (and assuming a steady stream of visitors to the question since the answer was posted) indicates that visitors to that question are roughly 50 times more likely to upvote a comment describing a post as 'completely worthless' than they are to downvote the post that they consider worthless. If people had been willing to downvote the post at the same rate that they're apparently willing to upvote my hostile comment, then it would have a massively negative score by now (as it ought to). But people have seen the post, observed that it is bad (and been comfortable expressing that via upvoting a comment that says so), and yet chosen not to downvote it, leaving it with a score that in no way represents its usefulness.

This is obviously unhelpful behaviour.

Why has this happened, and is there anything that we can or should do to modify people's voting behaviours? Do these people just really, really value their rep? Is this in fact explained by many viewers having the comment voting privilege but not the downvote privilege? Is there something statistically unusual about the viewers of that answer, or is this reluctance to downvote a site-wide problem?

Answer 1

Let's look at the timeline:

1. Answer was posted in April 2009, a time when SO tolerance was generally, well, infinity.
2. Not until September 2013 did a single person even notice or comment that there is a problem with the answer.

So, for starters, the answer already had a ton of benefit from pure momentum. I've been in the exact same scenario, and while I don't suspect this answer will ever be down-voted enough to out-weigh all the early up-votes (never mind make it look, on its own and without the comments, to be a bad idea), on the plus side, I was able to convince the OP to un-accept it.

Next, I don't know how many new people have seen the post since the comment was posted, never mind the comment itself (which a lot of people tend to ignore, especially on highly-up-voted answers).

I realize more people up-voted the comment than down-voted the answer, but then we're getting into psychology - it's much easier to up-vote a comment stating that you agree than it is to express very strongly that you agree by down-voting. There's also the fact that a down-vote costs them reputation they may not be willing to give - agreeing with a comment may be expression enough. I don't think you're going to get a real answer for this unless you can interview all of the people who up-voted your comment (and make the assumption that they answer you honestly).

I'm also not sure off the top of my head whether up-voting a comment and down-voting an answer are both possible at the same rep level. It's possible the latter requires more rep than the former.

Answer 2

I have the accepted answer. I wrote this 3+ years ago. It would be helpful to put it into context.

My point was if the OP wanted to reproduce the code of $.ready he could take the source and convert it himself. But it wasn't something that was easily recreated.

At the time I wrote the answer, the attempted answers were things like:

• body onload="ready()"
• put the script at the bottom! </html><script>ready()</script>
• onreadystatechange
• window.onload
• etc..

Most of those answers are still there and are all clearly naive and wrong. So at the time I felt it was best to post what I did to show all the posters that the above examples were not equivalent to jquery.ready()

I didn't think someone would actually take the time to re-implement a $.ready method for the OP (correctly anyways) and I can't take the time to do it since I have a job/family and don't have the time to spend several hours re-implementing $.ready.

Copy and pasting the source of jquery was only to show that the bad answers were not equivalent or even close to what jquery.ready() is doing.

The only decent answer besides mine is the one below it which is just copy pasta as well, so what do we do?

I think the thread is better WITH my answer than without it since so many answers are incorrect. I don't think I should delete my answer since my original intent is still relevant while all the bad answers remain.

Instead of posting rude comments that offer no value to the question at hand, it seems to me that your time would have been better spent :

• upvoting correct answers
• downvoting incorrect answers (even mine if you wish)
• writing your own answer

Answer 3

The basic mechanics of voting can somewhat account for this.

• It requires more reputation points to downvote than to upvote
• You lose a point when you cast a downvote, but nothing happens when to cast an upvote.

Knowing that the downvote will cost you makes you think twice, even though it is just one point. The upvote will have no effect on your reputation points, so it's much easier to impulsively upvote. Furthermore, as it requires more reputation points to downvote than to upvote, some users may not be able to downvote the post, so they will upvote the comment instead.

It also seems to me that comment votes are cast more freely than post votes. Perhaps comments seem less significant, so people use lower standards when deciding whether to vote or not.

Answer 4

There are at least three voting phenomena which are correlated:

1. Hesitation cast negative judgement on individuals, especially to their face,
2. eagerness to vote as the majority has already voted,
3. eagerness to suck up to seemingly more reputable individuals.

This is because the human race organizes in a fewer number of leaders and a larger number of followers. I say this without judgement on the human race, which would be pointless, but as a mere observation.

I also freely admit that I've played the role of the follower often enough in the past. It's difficult enough to even detect those instincts in oneself when one tries.

These traits easily epxlain what you were seeing: People are much more willing to follow your judgement by upvoting your comment than they are to actually cast judgement on someone's post themselves.

Standing on these premises I would assume that you even caused some of those who upvoted you to downvote the question even though they didn't check whether the answer really was unhelpful. They were merely your followers in that situation.

In the blogosphere this phenomenon is much more visible, because leaders are more likely to have a blog and followers are more likely to just be commenting. You have very fascinating social dynamics between blogs of competing political belief systems. There's the following pattern:

1. A blogger writes something that is likely to antagonize the enemy. Sometimes this is in response to an event in the mainstream media.
2. A blogger of the enemy responds with an own blog post in a hostile manner.
3. Some of the more dedicated followers of that enemy blogger come to the original blogger and leave hateful comments. The most dedicated ones will send threats to the author, something their leading blogger would never do themselves.
4. The blogger of the original post gets credited by his followers in proportion of his ability to attract enemy minions and how likely he managed to make the enemy blogger look like a fool.

This is only a slight exageration.

For a more well-known example just look at people's voting behavior in democratic elections. How many are voting and how many of those know what they are voting for? People don't vote on policies - not even because they don't understand them, although that as well - but simply because it's effort that won't pay off. So they instead opt for the more economical way of merely following a politician that appears to be on their side judged by his rhetoric. This is the only thing that can be checked rather cheaply, and the only other inexpensive alternative would be to not vote at all.

Answer 5

Bear in mind, you can up-vote a comment with only 15 reputation on the site. It takes at least 125 rep points before you can down-vote though, and as WolfLink notes there's a fair bit of reluctance even then since down-voting answers costs you rep.

Given the nature of the answer, I highly suspect a lot of those comment up-votes are from folks irritated that in order for the answer to be useful they have to read the code and understand what it's doing. Note that the second most-upvoted answer is much more copy-paste ready, and as a result has gained a fair bit of ground in spite of being posted over two years later.