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Request: Show the totals for your question-votes and answer-votes only to you on your profile page.

Use cases:

  1. Curiosity
  2. Self-evaluate a voting trend
  3. Get the Electorate badge

While case #3 will happen, it's unintended. Some badges do not have indication of when you're about to receive them, but many do; for example: Nice Answer, Populist, and even Autobiographer. However, I don't think the abuse of this feature in case #3 will be noticeably detrimental.

Rationale: I'm trying to solve the problem of long-term, active users neglecting to vote for questions and not even realizing their own tendency. Simply by making this information available, more users will become aware of it, and it will lead to more active users voting in their desired question:answer ratio goals (which shouldn't be hard to socially steer to match the "community goal").

Plus it'd just be interesting to see.

Of course, introducing the badge prompts awareness too (I wasn't even aware there is a "problem" before), but that will decline over time, and probably swiftly. Perhaps a message once a month if you're below a certain question:answer ratio: "You only have 0.0001% question votes. See your profile."

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  • 6
    Full disclosure: Yes, I voted on 20 questions and no answers today. Was it to be a badge whore, or was it because I realized I should start voting on questions more?
    – Gnome
    Jan 3, 2010 at 9:14
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    You make a lot of fuss just because for one badge ;)
    – Ladybug Killer
    Jan 3, 2010 at 13:27
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    Yeah, I tend to ignore meta until I have a reason, like to go asking about a new badge, and then ideas flow on that topic. :P Honestly though, I think this would be an improvement and has the potential to achieve the desired effects of the Electorate badge (and continue to achieve them, instead of zero feedback after you get the badge), without any of the drawbacks mentioned in meta.stackexchange.com/questions/34377 and elsewhere.
    – Gnome
    Jan 3, 2010 at 14:12
  • But I'm not saying to replace or remove that badge here either. (Don't want to open the floodgates on whether it's a good idea or not, just assume it is good and here's a even better way to socially encourage Q:A ratios on an ongoing basis.)
    – Gnome
    Jan 3, 2010 at 14:18
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    Frankly, I think the problem is that the vast majority of questions simply are not very good. I don't see badges or data displays fixing this.
    – nb69307
    Jan 3, 2010 at 14:52
  • I expect this will be declined along with the other requests for statistics that are primarily useful for seeing badge progression. e.g. see Jeff's response at meta.stackexchange.com/questions/88/…
    – Ether
    Jan 3, 2010 at 18:23
  • I don't think that's how it's primarily useful, especially if encouraging high Q:A vote ratios is desired.
    – Gnome
    Jan 3, 2010 at 18:45
  • @Neil: isn't that what the Strunk-and-White badge is for?
    – quack quixote
    Jan 14, 2010 at 20:11
  • Can this be gleaned from the data dump? I suspect not, but figured someone would know off the top of their head.
    – Pollyanna
    Jan 14, 2010 at 20:25
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    @Pollyanna: No, AFAIK the votes in the DB are anonymous so there's no way to know how many question votes and/or answer votes someone has cast
    – Kyle Cronin
    Jan 14, 2010 at 20:32

2 Answers 2

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I asked a very similar question. It's not going to happen, because of the following reasons by Jeff:

Jeff Atwood's answer was accepted for that question, and it basically says that you're not meant to know when you'll get the Electorate badge -- it's supposed to be a surprise.

Some of the badges are supposed to be surprises, not World of Warcraft style level grinds based on numbers.

I worry that if we provide too many metrics:

  • it becomes noise, like a bunch of inscrutable F-16 cockpit gauges -- how are all these numbers useful except for these specific badges?
  • the badge becomes the explicit goal instead of the desired behavior
  • the badges are no longer a pleasant surprise and reward but an expected "level up"
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  • Q:A vote ratio could still be shown without revealing Electorate status by only showing it to those that have the badge. I'd still find it useful for the reasons given (and I already have Electorate on SO and MSO, FWIW).
    – Gnome
    May 19, 2010 at 13:23
  • Oh I agree, I would love to have such a metric also. I was just stating that Jeff doesn't want such metric, as he says, "it becomes noise, like a bunch of inscrutable F-16 cockpit gauges".
    – The Unhandled Exception
    May 19, 2010 at 14:03
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I was about to ask for this too, but since it's already there... So yeah it'd be great.

I don't think it would encourage bad behaviour. A lot of good questions get 1 maybe 2 upvotes and it's not until recently that I realized that I wasn't upvoting questions a lot (only if it was funny+cw or if it was something I was looking for).

I am not for the message if your ratio is messed up. I think it's not that big of a deal, not like the acceptance rate.

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  • Note I'm not feature-requesting the ratio message, that's just part of some included discussion (which should probably have been elsewhere).
    – Gnome
    Feb 18, 2010 at 15:59
  • A ratio would be nice, or some kind of indication of votes on comments versus questions/answers even...
    – nicorellius
    May 6, 2010 at 0:23

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