Remove the -1 reputation penalty for downvoting answers on Meta.SE

Question

Because other Meta sites in the network don't have their own reputation (instead relying on the reputation of their parent sites), there is no reputation penalty for downvoting answers on those sites. This is a good thing: Meta sites invite robust debate and discussion where ideas, in the form of answers, can be voted up and down freely.

However, on MSE, there is a reputation penalty to downvote an answer. This is problematic for two reasons:

1. People likely avoid downvoting answers to avoid losing rep. It certainly crosses my mind when voting, especially when I'm near a milestone.

2. People who use the network but don't actively ask or answer on MSE can't downvote more than 2 answers before they lose the "vote down" privilege.

I'd suggest that this be removed for MSE specifically in order to match the system in place on other Meta sites.

Answer 1

It's worth thinking about the fact that the downvoted user loses twice the reputation you do, and the 'cost' kinda acts as a check against blatant downvoting.

While our system does alright with serial voting against one user, sometimes we notice stranger patterns. This kind of removes one of the checks against downvoting for its own sake.

Most meta sites don't have reputation—we do. Having 'free' downvotes kinda turns it into something that could be used tactically.

I downvote—when I need to, and the penalty is an investment (that I may get back!) in showing my opinion on a post. I spend that reputation—in some cases to express my disagreement with a point of view. While as a moderator I don't downvote to delete I could.

Unless there was no penalty on both parties of a downvote it would put a significant advantage to the downvoter. While there's a daily voting limit, a canny downvoter could spend all their free downvotes across the site every day. While you're removing the chilling effect of downvoting on the reputation-sensitive user, we also have folks who're afraid to express their opinions in answers because "They would be downvoted"—and this would increase the chilling effect there.

I mean, in theory, in some cases the judicious use of community wikis (so 'free' downvotes) might help mitigate some of it and wouldn't be too drastic a change in the 'reputation economy,' but the proposal feels like it would tip things towards avid downvoters to a large extent as it is.

Answer 2

On most sites, people do not need to be an excellent speaker. They "just" need to be knowledgeable on the topic of the site to be able to participate. That grants them voting rights on policy on the corresponding meta site.

The problem I see it that on meta.stackexchange one needs to be able to be a good speaker and also have a popular opinion in order to successfully participate. I find that to be a strange requirement just be to able to properly vote on policy that affects the site one wants to participate in.

I don't want to write this post. But I want to downvote Makoto's post. It's sitting at +5/-5 and that score looks like people are evenly divided in their opinion about it. They're not. I'm certainly not in agreement with it at all, but I didn't vote on it, because I only have two downvotes. I'm saving them for when something worse comes. Like "I agree with the removal of <some> feature too".

The original post at the top is sitting with a total of 31 votes (-23/-8). I'm going to guess that I'm not the only user that upvoted that, and therefore not the only one that also wants to downvote one or more of the responses.

Answer scores will, with the current policy, be deceptive. They'll look better than the actual opinion of the users reading them.

The irony of this is that as soon as a downvote comes in on this post, I'll lose my ability to use my two downvotes on other posts.

Answer 3

I have more than once "spent" reputation on Meta posting something I knew would be an unpopular opinion just to get people talking about a particular aspect of something or let people vote on that perspective without having to stick their own head up for the Meta whack-an-opinion game.

The solution (in my opinion) is to create a better mechanism for gathering feedback on meta sites than abusing the Q&A format of the main sites. What does that mechanism look like? I dunno, but we should end the cycle of endlessly discussing the same incremental changes to "fix" things that we are using in ways they were never originally designed to be used. At some point we have to stop saying "ignore the tooltip—a downvote on Meta means you disagree with the post, except sometimes it doesn't." and start thinking about how we can accomplish what we're trying to do more effectively.

The improvements to the election questionnaires is an example of what I mean. It's not a completely foreign UI, but it's not a baling wire and duct tape change either.

Answer 4

This is a good thing: Meta sites invite robust debate and discussion where ideas, in the form of answers, can be voted up and down freely.

I'll argue that downvoting isn't nearly as important on this site (and perhaps other meta sites) as people like to think it is. On main sites, downvoting helps in pushing bad content to the bottom of the page, and a negative post score is a requirement tied to some community clean-up privileges, like being able to vote to delete not-an-answers. To that extent, downvotes here on Meta.SE serve a double purpose: They are used to voice disagreement, and to unlock those clean-up efforts.

For a robust debate and discussion, you don't need downvotes (or upvotes), because "voting" is a stage that happens after debate and discussion. On meta sites the two are often concurrent to an extent, but you can't have debate and discussion using only votes. "I agree" and "I disagree" isn't a discussion, it's a poll. For a debate/discussion, you need multiple posts that set out arguments, some which are arguing for something, others which are arguing against that same thing. And, this aren't only going to be answers: A question can just as well argue for or against something.

Sure, in the end you want to see which people like the most, which arguments the most people agree with, but that can be achieved with upvotes only just as well as with downvotes. You vote for the things you want to endorse, and you don't vote for the things you disagree with. If there is a healthy discussion going on, there will be a question or answer to upvote, without needing to downvote to show what you agree with.

If there isn't anything on a meta post yet that you can agree with, try to explain why! For a healthy, robust debate and discussion, the explanation, the counterarguments, are much more important than a downvote. If there is a question arguing for something, I can write an answer to explain why it shouldn't be done. And then people can either upvote the question, or upvote my answer, or upvote another answer.

It is easy to downvote answers without having to come up with a counterargument. But, given how easy that already is, I often personally feel it gets more in the way of people actually discussing things. People already sometimes state they don't write posts on meta sites, because their posts will be downvoted, and that doesn't seem to depend on a 'reputation penalty'. MSO has/had a bad reputation for that too, and it doesn't come with reputation at all.

I'd suggest that this be removed for MSE specifically in order to match the system in place on other Meta sites.

In this case, I would argue against doing only this. Removing the reputation costs for giving downvotes to answers only will skew an already sub-optimal system further. Also, it won't 'match the system' in place on other Meta sites, because other meta sites don't come with reputation for anything. And, like I wrote above, it may actually get in the way of discussion because people get even more afraid of receiving downvotes and as such there won't be debate and discussion anymore.

There's a whole discussion that can be had about how to improve the system, I'm not going to argue against that. Maybe one day we'll get rid of reputation here, find some other way to dole out the privileges that come with community moderation on this site...

If we're going to discuss changes to that system, with the intent of giving more people a voice, I'd rather see changes that focus on actually encouraging discussion and debate, and the giving of actual arguments, over changes that focus on making it easier to poll for agreement or disagreement. Sadly, at this moment, I too don't know what those should specifically look like... but I do know making downvoting others easier while the other problems still stand doesn't seem to match that direction.

Answer 5

Meta sites are exception and Meta SE is the the epitome of the exceptions on SE, anyway, while Meta SE sticks to the SE model I think that we should handle the problems not by removing the downvote cost (-1) but by other means. ​i.e. lower the reputation required to downvote.

The above is just an example of alternative ways to allow low rep users to express their opinion by means of voting (+1/-1) which is a way better than forcing no-so-low rep users to post a comment.

Answer 6

I do agree with removing the rep cost specifically for MSE, but I think it'd need to also come with an added restriction that reduces the total votes you can cast in a day. Effectively, change it such that the "cost" is using up your ability to vote, rather than rep.

This would effectively even out the penalty across the board rather than giving people with a steady rep income free reign to vote on everything with impunity while those without are steadily moving toward not being able to downvote at all. MSE is slow enough that being limited to, say, 20 votes a day rather than 40 would still let most people vote as much as they normally do.

Answer 7

This separation has existed since the early days of Meta Stack Exchange being Meta Stack Overflow.

Even after the split, it's more a main site because Meta Stack Exchange doesn't have a corresponding Meta site associated with it (there's no Meta Meta Stack Exchange for example), and the formal "Stack Exchange" site is just the network landing page.

Interactions on this site should behave just like other main site interactions, because while the scope of the topics is different, most of the fundamentals do not radically diverge for that of any normal site.

Downvoting an answer should have an associated cost with it. If you're just able to do it for free, then you don't have any real gate or check on whether or not someone took the extra 10 seconds to panic about losing a unicorn point before clicking the button, or better yet, if they really felt like the answer was not that great.

---

Since some folks think this is more opinion more than informed conjecture, I've got some literature for y'all.

First, this is literally how downvotes work. You lose 1 reputation for downvotes and the poster loses 2. The rationale is clearly spelled out here by Jeff Atwood - you have to do something to stop people from going downvote-happy.

Quote of a quote inbound...

Please do something else to discourage downvoting. Maybe increase the cost to the downvoter (there’s already a “declined” on force user to comment on downvoting).

This isn’t about points. It’s about participation. Downvoting should be reserved for nasty/offensive/stupid/poorly-thought-out/totally-off-base comments. If someone spends the time to make an honest effort to answer a question, but it’s not that great an answer, just don’t upvote them… Downvoting sends a message, “We disapprove. You spent your valuable time, but we don’t care.” It makes me think, why should I bother spending the time to write up answers for this forum?

I stopped posting on several usenet newsgroups because the major participants were just nasty and sarcastic. Don’t let this happen to Stack Overflow.

[...] The problem isn’t downvotes, per se, but encouraging responsible downvoting.

So yes, from around the very beginning of the site, downvotes being at least not free was considered a key value of the network. Downvoting is still an important thing, and to be blunt, very few things in life that are important are free or should be taken for granted.

If you're too worried about losing reputation when downvoting, perhaps you shouldn't be downvoting.

Second, the original Meta Stack Overflow always had separate reputation from Stack Overflow, which was always unlike any meta site. This behavior was intentionally preserved as Meta Stack Exchange became its own site which serves its own role as a kind of catch-all arbitration ground for network-wide impacting things, such as themes, or generic discussions around things like Beta status or general questions about the network-at-large.

Not knowing this background about the network and wanting to insist that it change to suit your perception of what Meta sites are is short-sighted at best. While I won't deny that some of the company's decisions can make absolutely no sense, and can be incredibly arbitrary for no clear reason, if nothing else, the decision to penalize you for downvoting a question because you felt like it is still useful to prevent you from going completely unrestrained on downvoting questions because you didn't quite like its shape.

I mean, all it takes is for you to get a single upvote on a question or answer nowadays, and with that association bonus, you can downvote a whopping 11 answers.

This is not a hard hurdle to cross.

Don't make it seem that way.

To reply to some thoughts in the comments:

@Makoto I reviewed almost 4000 posts on another site. Why must I post here to be able to vote on the review announcement? Why would you even think to say that I'm "not participating". Or are you saying that in order to have influence about how reviewing works on the site where I review I must also give my time here. Posting what? Chat-chat posts about "What motives you to keep answering posts on your favorite site"? Those seems to get people lots of reputation points.. :O

There is not and never has been any magic bullet to address this concern. The thought of saying that someone who is well renowned in one part of the Internet automatically meaning that they can be successful or can contribute at a high level in another part of the Internet has always been a problem that the site has struggled with.

The blunt reality is that sites across the network - even if they feel similar - really are different. To get reputation on one site, you have to earn it. To earn it, you have to participate on the site you want to participate on.

I have heaps and heaps of reputation as well. Doesn't mean I'd be valuable as a reviewer on a site like Judaism or Chess because I wouldn't be as in-context to what everything is.

I don't see why having an opinion (disagreeing with a post) should result in a reputation removal. Considering here on Meta.SE, downvote typically means disagreement, not somewhere like SO or Anime.SE (or most SE sites in general) where downvotes imply a low quality or incorrect answer.

No one's taking your opinion away. Your opinion just doesn't get to be free, but it is at least inexpensive to express. Maybe this gets at the heart of "responsible" downvoting - I have an opinion on a lot these days and while I could downvote almost every answer, I've more or less matured to the degree that I prefer having sensible discourse and talking about why I disagree with something in a separate answer while also expressing how I really feel on a question or answer.

Answer 8

One problem with removing the penalty is that unpopular posts are needed to make a good discussion.

If you remove the DV penalty you are effectively increasing community censorship. That will tend to pile on authors whose opinion diverges from the majority. As others have said, as long as there's a reputation system on MSE the downvote penalty levels the field - however slightly, more than it constitutes a barrier to participation.