Obnoxious down-voting? [duplicate]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Max downvotes per question/answer

I recently posted a wrong answer. This answer was accepted by the OP (thus making it indelible), and has, at this time, -7 votes. I got tired of losing rep, so I CW'd the answer.

But it got me thinking: what is the point of an answer which has less than -1 votes?

An answer with 0 votes could mean "highly controversial" (many up/down votes canceling), "neutral" (not a bad answer, but not great), or "not seen yet" (recently posted, not evaluated yet.)

But an answer of -1 means: "Wow. This was so bad and unhelpful that it needs to be marked as such. I trust the answerer a little bit less too, making them less reputable on the site." A negative vote-count is pretty bad and embarrassing.

Which leads to the question: what is the point of answers which are so heavily downvoted? It eventually gets really really rude and snippy.

Is it really so bad when someone asks a poorly-conceived question because they misunderstand the website, assignment, or technology they want to use? (Case in point, there is a huge problem that clients complain that their website is "taking too long" to develop - so the vague question "How long should a website take to build?" is actually a very reasonable and relevant problem for a programmer to solve.)

Bad answers are far more dangerous: they propagate bad knowledge. While this answer is vastly unhelpful, -18 votes is only relevant to show that it is worse than a post with -17 votes, but really, once a post is negative, who cares? While I have no idea what the "JS" is in this person's post, half of the answer is pretty correct and reasonable. And I don't even know what the (downvoters'?) coments mean.

The only explanation I can think of is some sort of bandwagon effect. "Aargh, we'll show them! How dare they waste my time with such an inane response?" Its obnoxious and makes us look like twits.

So I can think of two solutions (if anyone else feels this strongly about this! Which is likely nobody, but hey.)

1. Cap the vote score to -1 or -2 or something. Just so everybody gets the point.

2. Have increasing cost to the voter for negative downvotes. How about this: if i is the vote count after performing a downvote, and i < 0, then the points lost could be expressed as:

n = abs(i)

points lost = 2^(n-1)

So the first negative vote would give -1 points to the voter. Then -2, -4, -8. So that, by the time the post has a vote count of -4... it stops becoming worthwhile to join that bandwagon. (one could also use fib(n), rather than 2^n).

Alternately, one could increase the rep requirement to downvote for very negative values of i. You need 1000 rep to vote something to -2, but then 1500 to vote it to -3.

Do others feel like this is a problem?

Answer 1

If you don't like the negative votes, instead of saying "oh well, it's wrong, sorry", edit the answer into something right.

Answer 2

(Note: my C/C++ isn't strong enough to talk about the merit of your specific answer. I will assume that the downvoters are correct and that your answer is incorrect and misleading. Obviously downvotes for a correct answer are always bad, but occasionally happen.)

What's the point of downvoting something heavily? To show that it is categorically wrong. That's particularly important when the answer is accepted - an answer which has just -1 and is accepted may have been downvoted by a couple of people who misunderstood it, but it was actually fine.

If something has been voted down to -7, that's a clear indicator that the answer is wrong and should not be trusted in any way, shape or form, unless it's got an edit to say something along the lines of "Yes, I got it wrong - here's the right answer." (I usually get rid of the incorrect text at that point to avoid misleading people.)

I have absolutely no problem with something being downvoted a lot, any more than I have a problem with something being upvoted a lot.

As for being worried about losing reputation through it - the answer was accepted. Even if you only got 7 downvotes, you still gained a point of reputation in total despite posting something so wrong that it was downvoted that heavily. How can you feel hard done by?

Personally I would suggest editing the post to wipe out all the previous text, just to say "This answer was incorrect. I will delete it when it's been unaccepted." Then add a comment to the question requesting that the original posted unaccept it. When that's happened, you can delete it. (I've been through a similar situation, although my incorrect answer was upvoted instead of downvoted. When I realised my mistake I made it correct, but still requested that it be unaccepted in favour of another correct answer, so I could delete it.)

Answer 3

You did get a minor technicality wrong. Most C++ compilers define NULL like:

#define NULL 0

So the compiler doesn't know it's a pointer.

The downvote explanations don't strike me as particularly enlightened:

Notice that your linked site says "NULL is defined as a null pointer constant" - not as a null pointer!

So a "null pointer constant" is not a "null pointer" ?

The next comment (with 5 "great comment" votes) reads:

In C++, NULL will not be (for example) "(void*)0" -- that's clearly not allowed. 

But Microsoft's Visual C++ compiler thinks it's OK for NULL to be a (void*):

NULL == (void*)0   // True
void* p = NULL;    // Compiles

So your answer is not exactly right, but still pretty informative and helpful. Unlike the technically correct answers, you explained the issue in a way that the original poster understood. So you got 15 rep for the accepted answer. Looks like you actually lost rep by marking this as community wiki :)

Answer 4

All the big negative downvote means is that N more people (for a -N score) thought "This answer is not useful" than thought "This answer is useful". If you would like to avoid getting downvoted into oblivion, I would imagine that not posting answers that aren't useful would be the best course of action.