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Are there any statistics that would show changes in voting patterns across SE sites since there was a change in the reputation system rewarding question upvotes with 10 points?

I am asking about voting patterns - numbers of votes cast up or down, not impact on users' reputation.

There are few possible outcomes:

  • Nothing has changed; voting counts on questions have not significantly changed
  • There are more upvotes cast to questions
  • There are more downvotes cast to questions

Are there any significant differences between different sites?

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  • 5
    I can't speak for anyone else, but I've certainly changed my voting habits since the change in reputation.
    – Alex
    Commented Dec 1, 2019 at 15:11
  • 4
    @Alex This. Pretty much sums it up. On Stack Overflow questions that are really worth upvoting are rare, if you are moderating, most of your votes go to downvoting anyway. But, now I would think three times before upvoting question that is anything but stellar (that does not include my voting habits here because Meta is completely different beast)
    – Resistance Is Futile
    Commented Dec 1, 2019 at 15:49
  • It's not clear to me that the goal of the change was to produce a change in question voting pattern. I think the unclear goal was one of the bigger problems with the rollout
    – Scott Seidman
    Commented Dec 2, 2019 at 16:13
  • @ScottSeidman I never said that was the goal of the change. I am only asking whether patterns have changed as the result of the reputation change.
    – Resistance Is Futile
    Commented Dec 2, 2019 at 18:33

1 Answer 1

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I created a similar SEDE query before to measure the effects of a strike, both site-specific and networkwide. When you compare the week after the change (Nov 14th up to Nov 20th) with the week before (Nov 6th up to Nov 12th) – I've left Nov 13th out since the change was announced during that day – you see a 9.4% increase in upvotes and a 12.8% increase in downvotes:

enter image description here

However, I don't think we can call that significant yet. If I look at the site analytics for the sites where I have that privilege, fluctuations of that level are very common. I guess we need data over a longer period (and compensate for the increased number of users who can vote because of the reputation change).

(Note that SEDE is updated once a week on Sunday morning, so currently the data is complete up to November 30th.)

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  • The recent SO.blog on Question Quality points to Q&A - A/B testing , and this query: Historical question grades by week (which, for our SO site) shows a graph indicating "neutral" questions increased (neutral being defined as: "Score = 0 and !Closed and AnswerCount = 0"). Good and bad questions seemed to have a blip. - Glorfindel, would modifying that query be a good starting point?
    – Rob
    Commented Dec 1, 2019 at 13:57

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