6

Consider a well written, properly presented and clear question on either a subject that could be controversial or proposing simply an unpopular concept.

The question gets well reasoned, detailed answer(s) which makes sense and draws a good conclusion, also being accepted by OP.

On the other hand, the significant level of disagreement to the original proposal translates into a lot of down-votes.

I'm in this sort of situation now and I'm facing the following dilemmas:

  • should I delete the question altogether? (since it's affecting my reputation score)
  • is it fair to delete the question? (since some people put in effort so that we, as a community, have now this aspect sorted out)
  • do we differentiate between poor quality questions and good quality questions on disliked matters?

I feel that disagreement in Meta should not discourage people to post and should not encourage questions answered "No" to be removed.

Improve this question
2
  • 2
    See also: [Voting on Meta is not just for (dis)agreement. Update the help center to reflect this ](meta.stackexchange.com/q/187018/21960) – ale Nov 6 '18 at 14:16
  • So long as the post is approached constructively, I find that, generally, it'll stick around. It might be closed as a duplicate, but there's usually no reason to re-hash the same discussion over and over. Now, if it's just a rant and complaining that someone doesn't like how things work....it gets lots of downvotes, is quickly closed, and deleted in short order. This is the only meta where voting affects your score; all others pull from the parent site. – fbueckert Nov 6 '18 at 14:20
6

Downvotes on Meta can be both: the tooltip on the downvote is still valid:

This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful

and in addition you have Meta votes:

On posts tagged feature-request, voting indicates agreement or disagreement with the proposed change rather than just the quality or usefulness of the post itself.

In practice, this often applies to posts as well.

So in the case of

a well written, properly presented and clear question on either a subject that could be controversial or proposing simply an unpopular concept

it's clear that the latter applies.

  • should I delete the question altogether? (since it's affecting my reputation score)

In your case, it's not possible to delete it since it has an accepted and upvoted answer.

  • is it fair to delete the question? (since some people put in effort so that we, as a community, have now this aspect sorted out)

That's exactly why it's not possible to delete the question.

  • do we differentiate between poor quality questions and good quality questions on disliked matters?

Unfortunately, no. This is one of the shortcomings of the current Meta, but that's what you get when it has been implemented as yet another Q&A site with reputation. Anyway, reputation here should be taken with an extra grain of salt.

Improve this answer
5
  • reputation here should be taken with an extra grain of salt. maybe that is easy to say for us with our out-of-control amount of fake-internet-points ... – rene Nov 6 '18 at 15:43
  • @rene Even very negatively scored posts tend to still earn reputation, as a result of the fact that upvotes add so much more reputation than downvotes remove. To have posts that lose any amount of reputation to be relevant (even for someone without much) requires a post to be almost universally opposed, rather than simply being controversial, while still being popular enough to get enough total votes to have a notable effect. That's pretty rare. On top of that, if the user is new, they won't even have much rep to lose, so most of the downvotes won't have any effect at all. – Servy Nov 6 '18 at 16:01
  • 1
    ... says Mr 71,858 reputation ... :D – rene Nov 6 '18 at 16:05
  • It actually looks like I do have the option to delete the question even if it has an upvoted, accepted answer. (I didn't try the irreversible final Delete action though, after I'm being asked if I'm sure) – Iulius Curt Nov 6 '18 at 21:18
  • 1
    It won't work, you'll get a popup after confirming the action. Also, in cases where you can actually delete your own question, you get the option to undelete it as well, so it's not an irreversible action. – Glorfindel Nov 6 '18 at 21:23

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .