Possible Duplicates:
Should the weight of downvotes be increased?
Should we reduce rep bonus for upvotes on posts with a negative score?
OK, this may sound like a big change but this is something that I believe could have good impact on the quality of the users questions and answers and would result in reputation being more fair.
The problem:
Currently if a question/answer gets up-voted to poster earns rep of 10 points, when it gets down-voted 2 points are being deducted. That scenario works pretty well for answers but unfortunately when it comes to questions there is some areas where I think it fails. For example: poor questions, controversial questions and average questions
Here is the scenario:
Someone asks very poor question,
- it gets down-voted: say it gets 3 down-votes
- some nice and patient so user comes along and edits that question to improve it
- other so users see question with 3 downvotes and say: "hey it does not deserve to have minus vote, lets upvote"
- the question ends up with the rep 0, but the OP of that poor question ends up with the reputation of: +24!
They are some users that frequently ask rather poor quality questions, and end up with a pretty high reputation
similarly average question: - a question that is being initially down-voted and up-voted only because other users think that it did not deserve to have -1 rep. The OP ends with higher reputation
controversial question: - a question that attract many up-votes and down-votes earns the user many rep points
controversial answer: - same as controversial question
Basically it seems that this type reputation system in some scenarios rewards people for the behaviour that should not really be encouraged.
I think there is a simple solution to that:
Instead of earning reputation for each up-vote and down-vote recorded it could be earned based on the overall vote balance for the question or answer.
Currently if a question gets 3 downvotes and 2 upvotes the question shows "vote balance" -1 but the OP earns +14 points on reputation (-6 for 3 downvotes, +20 for 2 upvotes). In proposed solution he would have got -2 points as question shows "vote balance" -1
For example
user1 - someone asking rather poor questions,has 3 questions and 1 answer
Vote Balance up-votes down-votes reputation earned Q1: -1 2 3 +14 (+20 -6) Q2: -1 0 1 -2 Q3: 0 3 3 +24 (+30 -6) A1: -1 0 1 -2 -------------------------------------------------------------- Total Reputation: +34
user2 - a new user, asking ok questions, but ones that do not bring that much attention
Vote Balance up-votes down-votes reputation earned Q1: 0 0 0 0 Q2: 0 0 0 0 Q3: 0 0 0 0 A1: 1 1 0 +10 -------------------------------------------------------------- Total Reputation: +10
user3 - providing controversial answers
Vote Balance up-votes down-votes reputation earned A1: 1 11 10 +90 (+110 -20) A2: -1 4 5 +30 (+40 - 10) -------------------------------------------------------------- Total Reputation: +120
If we applied the logic on awarding the reputation based on each question overall performance then it would be as below
user1 - someone asking rather poor questions,has 3 questions and 1 answer
Vote Balance up-votes down-votes reputation earned Q1: -1 2 3 -2 Q2: -1 0 1 -2 Q3: 0 3 3 0 A1: -1 0 1 -2 -------------------------------------------------------------- Total Reputation: -6 (perhaps rep less then +1 could be allowed)
user2 - a new user, asking ok questions, but ones that do not bring that much attention
Vote Balance up-votes down-votes reputation earned Q1: 0 0 0 0 Q2: 0 0 0 0 Q3: 0 0 0 0 A1: 1 1 0 +10 -------------------------------------------------------------- Total Reputation: +10
user3 - providing controversial answers
Vote Balance up-votes down-votes reputation earned A1: 1 11 10 +10 A2: -1 4 5 -2 -------------------------------------------------------------- Total Reputation: +8
It think that it would better represent the user's contribution.
Also it could be a part of the solution for Handling “Problematic” Stack Overflow participants as the users that continuously ask poor question would end up with reputation less then 0 (if allowed)
I have added this solution as an answer to Should the weight of downvotes be increased?