If more users could vote, would they engage more? Testing 1 reputation voting on some sites

Question

Update April 3rd, 2024

We have posted an update on the status of this experiment on MSO. Please leave any feedback, questions, or critiques on that post.

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TL;DR: We are interested in finding 2-3 Stack Exchange sites willing to volunteer to test lowering the reputation required to upvote and downvote to 1 so that we can understand how this change impacts participation on sites. This test will be run with direct communication between the company and the moderation teams and we will be monitoring user behavior during the tests for specific indications that adjustments to tooling or ending the test may be necessary. If successful, we'd like to expand this change to the network.

What is the background of this experiment?

We've long understood that many users find it difficult to participate on Stack Exchange in some ways. We have collected user research over the years indicating that many people have struggled to participate because they feel the restrictions about who can vote are too limiting and prevents them from indicating when questions or answers are good or bad. While one of the core concepts of Stack Exchange is that anyone should be able to freely access the content and have the opportunity to ask, answer, or edit, this openness doesn't extend to other privileges on the sites.

We’ve historically used reputation as a way to prevent misuse, but in doing so we’ve made it hard for people to participate at all without creating content. By removing or changing some of these barriers to participation, we hope to spur participation and engagement - including posting, voting, and curation/moderation. The goal of this particular project is to understand the impact of removing the reputation required to upvote and downvote.

Reputation is a simplistic way to prevent abuse, but it doesn't reflect actual risk or a user's experience with the site or subject. By understanding the impact of removing the reputation barrier, we can find more targeted ways to address abuse for users of all reputation levels rather than sticking to the rather simplistic solution of relying on a reputation barrier to prevent wider-spread misuse of votes.

We have these restrictions in place for a variety of reasons, but the core concept behind all of them is to prevent misuse and protect the perceived value of the content on the sites. We do not want to make it more difficult for mods and community members to moderate content on the sites, nor do we want to see people inappropriately voting on content and thus reducing the value of the library of information.

As such, while removing the reputation required to vote is a five minute change to our privilege settings, we've spent the past few months understanding the potential risks of this change and adjusting our plans for this project. Based on voluminous thoughtful feedback from moderators across the network, we've made improvements to some moderator tools and have enhancements in the works based on their recommendations. While these changes aren't going to prevent all issues, they should make identifying and acting on them simpler.

Before we build additional moderator tooling and before we expand this test beyond these initial test sites, we want to see this change implemented on a few sites to see how it impacts engagement. It's important for us to hear from sites directly and see these changes in action to learn how changing the reputation to 1 changes voting behavior or if it adds an unreasonable amount of work for moderators and CMs to investigate. Our goal is to use this information to guide our future efforts, identify any necessary additional moderation tools, and validate whether these voting updates lead to increased engagement.

What would change for sites participating in this test?

There are three main privilege changes happening here as part of our test:

• Reputation required to cast upvotes is changing from 15 to 1
• Reputation required to cast downvotes is changing from 125 to 1
• The 1 reputation cost to downvote answers will be removed

We will notify logged-in users with <125 rep to let them know that they can vote with a popup.

To understand motivations for new downvoters, the first few downvotes from a <125-rep user would require them to explain their downvote - this information will not be posted anywhere, but will instead be collected by our research team and bucketed into categories so that we can better understand reasons people downvote. While we expect that many voters may just enter gibberish, we feel like we'll get at least some usable information.

While we have considered various options for this test, since our goal is to be as permissive as possible, we want to start with opening voting to everyone. Regarding removing the reputation required to downvote and the cost to downvote answers, this is a situation where we want to balance the system. Users don't like receiving downvotes, but they are vital to a quality-based system. When we're looking at things like an aging content base, we recognize that giving even passive users the opportunity to say "this answer doesn't work" may help combat that to some extent.

One major thing is not changing - having a registered account will be required for voting. Unregistered accounts and logged-out users will not be granted the ability to vote. Additionally, users who are suspended will still not be able to vote during their suspension.

What are the risks and challenges of this test?

Over the last few months, moderators have shared their feedback and concerns about this experiment, which have been related to changes to vote quality, disproportional increases in vote fraud, and difficulty identifying handling sock puppets with the existing moderation tools. We understand those concerns and have done our best to adjust our test plan to find a path forward that allows us to test our hypothesis without risking negatively impacting the entire network by suddenly changing voting practices. Much of our test plan is designed to catch cases the moderators have identified and give room for communication throughout the test.

To address their concerns about identifying vote fraud and sock puppetry, we've made various improvements over the last three months to these tools. While we generally avoid speaking too publicly about moderator tooling, here are some of the general improvements we've made or are planning to make:

• We have overhauled a moderator dashboard that draws attention to potentially suspicious votes and made it easier to find (live on site for use).
• We have overhauled the Moderator Messaging and CM escalation UI to show mods and CMs more history about the user in the message context (live on site for use).
• We are making it easier for moderators to find and act on sock rings (in design phase).
• We are making it easier to escalate groups of suspicious votes for CM review and invalidation (in design phase).

We're still working out some bugs in these tools but the feedback we've gotten indicates the updates are well-received and they're looking forward to further improvements.

What is the test plan?

We want to find 2-3 established sites that are willing to volunteer for this test. Preferably, these will be larger sites that have moderators willing to work directly with the members of the Community Enablement team, the team dedicated to this project whose primary responsibility for the past year has been creating and improving moderator and community management tooling.

Our specific plans for data collection include:

• Reviewing existing voting and participation data and analyzing the impact of the changes in collaboration with site moderators and community members
• Conducting user research to assess perceptions of post quality before and after this change
• Analyzing voting differences based on various factors including:
  • Reputation
  • Account age
  • Final outcome of the post - e.g. if a question is closed or deleted and why, or an answer is deleted
• Keeping an eye out for changes in users going undetected by tools that use reputation as a signal to block participation
  • This includes both built-in tools like SpamRam, as well as community-created ones like SmokeDetector.
• Setting guidance before the test that will help us identify cases where rolling back the changes or making other adjustments are necessary.

We intend to run this project as transparently as we can, considering it relates directly to voting, which is something that we try to keep as private as possible. Due to the sensitivity of this data, some of the communication will be on a Private Team with the moderators of these sites. We will ensure there is open communication of publicly shareable information with the sites directly through the moderators and staff working on this project.

Because our test includes regular monitoring and clear guidance on when reverting the change is the best course of action, our plan is to retain these changes unless we see evidence they're causing negative impacts that we can't address quickly by making changes to tooling or automations.

After the test has been running for a month, we will create a report to share with here on Meta Stack Exchange before we determine the next steps for this project.

Which sites will be chosen?

This is a big change, and we would really love to find sites willing to volunteer - we don't want to force any sites into this test group. While we have sites we think would be good options and we'll be reaching out to them directly, we encourage members of sites to discuss whether they're interested in participating in this test on child meta sites. We would like to have some of the larger sites participate and will likely lean towards them as the impacts of these changes will probably be seen more quickly than on very low-activity sites.

Conclusions / asks

Removing the reputation barrier to voting for all users is a change we feel will lead to more users being able to indicate post quality and usefulness, but we recognize that it will require a lot of care to ensure that we are educating voters about when to vote and encouraging them to follow acceptable voting practices while also preventing or removing votes that were cast inappropriately.

We recognize that you may have many questions or concerns about this project and that this post may seem like it doesn't include a lot of specifics about the risks of this change. In writing this question, we're trying to focus on the test to keep it short(er) - the version of this that was posted on the Stack Moderators Team three weeks ago was significantly longer, as it responded to many of the mods' specific concerns.

• If you think a site you participate in would be willing to test this, let us know in a comment so that we can reach out on the child meta site or start the meta discussion and flag the question to request mods to feature it on the site. We can create an answer with links to site discussions network wide.
• If you have questions, please ask them in answers so that we can respond to them individually. It really helps if you can try to limit answers to one primary concern.

We have spent over three months reviewing and re-evaluating our plans for this project based on a huge amount of very helpful feedback from moderators over the course of two questions on the mod team to get to where we are now. We really appreciate the feedback they shared with us because we want to investigate this change in a way that works to avoid negative impacts to the sites.

Answer 1

I totally understand why you're asking for volunteer sites, instead of forcing this on any site that doesn't want it, which would have gone down way worse with the mods/communities of those sites and with the broader SE community. But, I just thought of a potential drawback of that approach.

Any site willing to volunteer for this experiment is probably a site less likely to suffer negative consequences.

Thinking about some of the sites I'm familiar with, I can think of one site that would never volunteer for this, due to too many people willing to try too much abuse, and another site that's much more peaceful and might potentially volunteer in order to get vote numbers up with a relatively low risk of widespread abuse.

Please account for this kind of "selection bias" when analysing results.

If one site volunteers for having 1-rep voting and it goes reasonably well, that doesn't mean it would go similarly well on another site, with a completely different community! The sites most likely to suffer from it are also those least likely to volunteer for it, while any site willing to take the risk of volunteering is probably one that's risking less by doing so. Essentially, by asking for volunteers, you may end up skewing the results towards more positive outcomes.

Maybe this is obvious, but I thought it was worth mentioning explicitly ...

Answer 2

If more users could vote, would they engage more?

Of course. It's like putting a bowl full with candies in front of an hungry kid.

Is this good?

No. I really don't think so. Here are couple of reasons:

• The eager 1-rep users will start by downvoting each and every post of each and every user who dared posting a comment with any hint of criticism on their posts.
• Those users will then upvote blindly the first 20 (or whatever the votes limit is) posts they see.

There is a good reason why Stack Overflow cofounder decided to put in place reputation threshold for voting. That reason has never changed.

I understand the desperate times. I really do. And yes, desperate times call for desperate measures, and that's just one of many Stack Exchange is doing in this new odd AI Era. But I'm just saying: it's a mistake. It won't work in the way you think/hope it will.

Answer 3

Can those sites have the association bonus disabled/turned off?

One major concern that I (and likely others) share is that this may (and likely will) lead to voting rings and (rule breaking) sockpuppet accounts. As an added measure to prevent the effects of that spilling over to other sites, can that bonus be disabled, please?

Answer 4

Whatever poor sites decide to volunteer to be a guinea pig for this, they're going to be in for a world of hurt with limited hope to clean up afterwards.

Voting is one of the most subjective activities we do here, and there are people who already don't downvote questions based on their own belief system, not on the actual fact that a question or answer is bad.

The idea of opening the flood gates to literally everyone to vote on content is probably THE single riskiest experiment that you could hope to accomplish. In its wake would be the abrupt end of sensible curation.

The plan also does underpin and highlight a key dependency on the community to help with detecting patterns of bad behavior, which is...sure, that's what they're good at, but it'd be nice to have the assurance that they're on board with your changes here.

But more fundamentally, one thing I don't see called out nearly loudly enough is

how you plan to educate users on what to upvote, what to downvote and what not to upvote or downvote

and this is a problem that is so fundamental that it pains me to feel that I need to explain it.

I don't see myself having a future on this network if this experiment actually does succeed. I can't accept a world in which we just let everybody come here and rate content based on how they feel.

Answer 5

Voting is for winnowing and content curation. Are one-rep users really experienced enough to do that effectively?

The current thresholds are there for a reason. Simply removing or reducing them would be mayhem.

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One tiny thing that may help would be to make users take the Tour to receive the ability to vote. That way, new users at least have an idea of what to do with their votes, though whether they pay it any heed is uncertain.

Answer 6

I predict chaos if either of the two down voting proposals are adopted. A lot of first time users have little understanding of the site or its purpose. Having a small cost of down voting makes people think a bit before doing so. And requiring some experience also guards against malicious users.

Some down votes on sites I use (GOAT at two of them) are because people just don't want to hear the answer, even if it is correct. Even now, I suspect some down voting on questions is because people just don't agree that the question is important enough to them, irrespective of its importance to the OP.

Some more of the down votes I see have comments that suggest that a word or two in an answer caused someone to object, even though the answer itself was fine (valuable).

I have less to say about up voting, but a middle range option might be to have new users with little reputation only add, say 5 rep to an upvoted post rather than 10.

And if the changes to down voting are made then the site would need to be especially vigilant about serial down voting, possibly removing users who do it and reversing their votes. But that seems like a nightmare. This would especially apply to removing any cost of down voting.

Think of the bots.

As a side, I find the down voting criteria (This answer is not useful) to be extremely weak advice. Useful to who, exactly. Why, exactly. My personal criteria for down voting answers is whether the advice would be dangerous for the OP to follow. But I don't down vote answers giving different advice than I would give otherwise.

For many things a flag will do. For others, a comment is enough, and it may cause a writer to re-think their advice. A down vote alone gives little guidance to a writer unless there are a lot of them and even then, some answers with a lot of down votes are still valuable. I have a few highly down voted answers at Academia, and I'll still stand by the advice.

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Actual engagement with the sites is when people ask and answer questions, not so much when they vote, which doesn't actually even require reading posts. An alternative "carrot" for engagement might be an automatic rep boost for the first few (3-5) questions and/or answers made by individuals. It might lead to junk, of course, but might be worth a test. It might even get low rep long term users more engaged, not just newcomers. It would also get new users closer to the current limits and permit voting themselves.

To try to avoid junk, this proposal might award, say 50, rep points for the first five question posts on a site provided that the question itself has both a positive vote count and an answer with a positive vote count. And similarly for any of the first five answers with a positive count.

Answer 7

One of the big reasons that I use and contribute to Stack Exchange sites is because of the barriers to entry. Those barriers aren't difficult to overcome for someone who genuinely wants to participate, and they're generally effective at keeping the bots and trolls at bay. The SE network is one of the few places left where you can get trustworthy answers from knowledgeable people. Other sites (e.g. Reddit) allow anyone to vote on anything and they quickly become breeding grounds for trolls. Voting ends up reflecting what people personally like instead of what's accurate, so sites become self-reinforcing echo chambers and you can never tell what information you can believe. Users need to understand how the site works and how it's different from other places before they start skewing vote numbers (i.e., the quality indicators that comprise most of the SE sites' intrinsic value).

If you enable this feature on the Politics.SE page, it will devolve into Propaganda.SE faster than you can imagine. You cannot possibly build up moderator tools that will counteract the power of state-sponsored troll farms run by world leaders that can't handle any sort of criticism. I'd also expect heavy troll pressure on History.SE as well as any of the religious sub-sites. I highly recommend not implementing this sort of change on those sites at any point for any reason.

Answer 8

Will more users vote if you give more users the right to vote? Yes, yes they will. That is, however, not at all what would be desired, or likely, even tolerable.

Looking back at the initiatives put forth by the administration in the recent years, I can only recall those designed to increase user retention and not the quality of content. This is a metric that a social network would be interested in. A place where anyone can say anything, no matter how demonstrably false it is. Stack Exchange is designed to be the opposite of that.

As a meritocracy, we are not interested in as many people as possible clicking the buttons. We are interested in competent people clicking the buttons, and others not so much. Which, and that scares me the most, is likely no good for a social network manager, because the number of users engaged is countable and reportable as a managerial achievement, whereas the quality of said users is much harder to quantify.

It is absolutely to be expected that there exist people who do not qualify for a job.
I was born without either physical or psychological capacity to play basketball professionally, and if I showed up at an NBA office complaining that I felt excluded at the basketball field and asking them to put it in the rules that the basketball hoops must be lower and larger, I would be laughed out, and rightly so.

I understand that this mindset goes against the principle that anyone can be anything. That principle, however, is verifiably false, whereas the success of Stack Exchange, built on a different principle, is verifiably true. I would hate to witness a real and good thing to fade away because of a false and not so good idea.

With that being said, do note that the hoop that we have for full-fledged voting is not very high-hanging at all. Pretty much anyone who can communicate with sense can clear it in a very short time. Removing even that would serve no real purpose other than inviting people to your house you didn't really want to invite after all.

Answer 9

If more users could vote, would they engage more? Testing 1 reputation voting on some sites

1-rep users can already cast votes.

This is the message shown to all logged-in users who have less than 125 reputation on a given site:

Note this part of the message:

your feedback has been recorded

What about this data which you have been collecting for some ~13 years doesn't satisfy your needs?

Why can't that unsatisfied need be rectified by just changing the text of the modal rather than granting a dangerous privilege to people with zero experience on the site?

You could say something like

or something similar.

The impact of this proposed change is an unfair and untenable asymmetrical shift in power toward 1 rep users.

Currently, users of the site who have skin in the game (read: who answer or ask questions) can rest easy knowing that if someone wants to downvote them or upvote them, that someone will have at least also provided some kind of contribution. They've submitted some quality content at least somewhere on the network, either directly on that same site, or so much on another site that they've earned the association bonus on another site.

It's very easy to create an account, and if there's no requirement to learn how to use the site before that account can cast votes, you will see a huge increase in people casting votes for the wrong reasons, especially fraudulent ones. Voting rings will become a major issue for mod teams to deal with, more so than they already are (ask Stack Overflow mods if they want to increase the voting ring work they are doing by an order of magnitude).

As for removing the 1-rep cost for downvoting answers, I'm hesitant that will lead to more meaningful use. There's already no cost for downvoting questions, and those don't get downvoted nearly enough. I worry we'll just see people competitively downvoting other answers to questions they've posted their own answer to.

Answer 10

When it comes to the cost of casting downvotes on answers, would that change be retroactive, resulting in some users receiving a sudden influx of rep when this is added, and then losing it again if the test were to be disabled? Or will correct reputation levels be retained by calculating rep based on before experiment vs during.

Answer 11

If the end goal is to increase engagement, is allowing them to upvote and downvote posts with 1 rep the only option we had? And why did we directly reduce the reputation requirement to bare minimum? We should have taken a gradual approach (first reduce a bit, see the results and then decide if it should be reduced more or stay the same).

We could have done other stuff like (just my personal opinion):

• letting them post comments everywhere with low rep (not 1, perhaps 40).
• letting them downvote with perhaps 50 rep
• set bounties with perhaps 55 rep

And why a one size fits all approach for a testing phase? All communities would love to see increase in engagement, but I guess they know their communities better than us. Instead of us directly deciding 1 rep as the requirement for the testing phase, we could have asked sites to decrease the rep count to a number which they like (based on community consensus in meta, if they would like to reduce the rep requirement). They can analyse the output with SE's help and then decide together what could be the way forward (decrease rep requirement further or bring back to original or stay as is for some more time).

Answer 12

A list of per-site meta discussion

Because I like lists ^{_{(except when chatgpt makes them)}}.

From searching is:q [discussion] created:2023-09-19.. url:meta.stackexchange.com url:393127 on stackexchange.com. In order of number of site questions. Help is welcome with keeping this up to date.

Please avoid "meta-meta-effect-ing" these meta discussions: If you don't frequent said site, and you're not going to voice something specific to that community and its specific situation, leave their discussion be and let them have their talk (I'd even include leaving their voting be, but of course, I can't force you to do anything- only ask politely).

• Ask Ubuntu: Should we not participate in the one-rep voting experiment?
• TeX - LaTeX: Do we want to volunteer to test the lowered voting privilege?
• Unix & Linux: Should U&L participate in the "1 reputation voting" change?
• Cross Validated: Do we want to volunteer for the alpha test on lowering rep requirements for voting?
• Arqade: Should Arqade opt-in to the 1 reputation voting experiment?
• Home Improvement: No low rep voting, please!
• Graphic Design: Should we volunteer to test 1-reputation voting?
• Seasoned Advice: Do we wish to be part of the 1-rep-voting test?
• Arduino: Should Arduino SE participate in the '1-rep voting' test?
• Movies & TV: Should Movies & TV SE participate in the 1 reputation voting experiment?
• Code Golf: Is code golf going to be opting into the voting reputation requirement test?
• Pets: We're considering helping with the 1 reputation voting trial
• Expatriates: Do we want to participate in the 1 rep voting cap experiment?
• Retrocomputing: Should we avoid the low rep voting experiment?
• GenAI: Do we want to volunteer to test the lowered voting privilege?

Answer 13

Stack Exchange is facing an existential crisis . . .

and it has been for some time.[^1] Back in 2014, I proposed 4 attributes of a healthy Q&A site based on a 2011 ACM paper:

• Number of active users,
• Percent of questions answered,
• Speed of answers, and
• Question views.

The first and the last directly impact the company's bottom line and the middle two matter to users. In 2016 gerrit noticed answer rates falling on Stack Overflow. Median time to first answer was also rising, but that's a lot harder to suss out from just using the site.

And then it became quite obvious that you can get faster answers from ChatGPT than from asking on the internet. LLMs always answer your question and it can be argued that since they use a massive corpus, the number of people contributing to each answer dwarfs the competition. Shame that the answers are simplistic and buggy, of course. Still, you can always ask again and maybe you'll get lucky.

It's important to see that ChatGPT was the catalyst and not the cause. Q&A sites can thrive if there's a reasonable chance the asker will get an answer before the problem is overtaken by events. Stack Overflow sucks up a lot of the attention, so let's look at Mathematics instead. Here's a graph of the average number of answers per question and the rate of questions that go unanswered after 30 days on that site:

This is not as scary as Stack Overflow, but it's nearing the point where getting an upvoted answer to a good question[^2] on Math is about the same as flipping a coin. Since getting answers is the best encouragement for asking another question, this is a particularly detrimental to a Q&A site.[^3]

There's nothing sacred about the voting model

I was a beta user on Stack Overflow. As such, I was invested in the project of creating a community for programmers. Thankfully my argument for not having closed questions did not win the day. But Joel and Jeff did take suggestions from the community. In order to get the site up and running, they also made decisions based on educated guesses of what would work rather than any sort of scientific experimentation or data analysis. Given the tremendous success of Stack Overflow it's easy to assume those choices were correct.

Still, even if those decisions were perfectly tuned (they weren't) a lot has happened in the past 15 years. It's important to verify that assumptions made in the past still hold. For instance, did you know there was a time when people worried that Stack Overflow might become "brainless LOL-fest like Reddit or Digg"? Five years later someone commented (incorrectly) that people without reputation weren't able to ask questions at all. Pretty sure the network dodged the mindless fun bullet.[^4]

My point is that it would be foolish to not question or test the assumptions made early on.

Letting new users vote probably won't make much difference

When the feedback mechanism was introduced, it was a separate UI from the voting mechanism. At some point, the voting interface was repurposed for anonymous and low-reputation users to count as feedback. (Certainly by May, 2013. Probably late February of that year.) But it's never counted as an actual vote. Indeed, the action is recorded in an entirely separate table (PostFeedback) than regular votes (Votes on SEDE and Post2Votes, if I recall correctly, internally).

The proposed change moves the votes from registered users who can't vote because of reputation limits from the feedback table to the proper votes table. It also subjects these votes to all the restrictions of a real vote that (as far as I know) feedback is not subject to. For instance, votes will be rate limited and trigger voting fraud checks. So at least initially, there will be fewer votes than feedback events recorded. Over time the number might increase as users discover their votes now count.

So how many votes are we talking? For the week of 2023-07-04 on Mathematics, there were:

Week of	Vote Type	Daily Average
2023-07-04	UpMod	1350.857142
2023-07-04	DownMod	267.571428
2023-07-04	AcceptedByOriginator	93.142857
2023-07-04	ApproveEditSuggestion	51.714285

So ~1,300 upvotes and ~270 downvotes a day. Here's the post feedback for the same week:

Week of	Vote Type	Daily Average
2023-07-04	Anonymous DownMod	1278.428571
2023-07-04	Anonymous UpMod	795.571428
2023-07-04	Registered DownMod	1.285714
2023-07-04	Registered UpMod	1.142857

Since we can differentiate between anonymous feedback (I believe tracked by IP internally) and low-reputation user feedback (tracked by user ID), we can see that visitors click the downvote arrow almost as many times in a day as voters upvote. People who find posts via Google, are much less inclined to select the up arrow in this sample. But the number of registered users who have attempted to vote before they have enough reputation is a tiny fraction of feedback. As in, I rounded off more when I summarized the vote averages just now. So if Mathematics volunteered for this experiment, most people wouldn't likely notice any difference. I haven't found any sites that show different results when I use this query.

No silver bullets and no poison pills

So why bother? I suspect the people who make strategic decisions at Stack Exchange Inc. view this as low-hanging fruit that will make a small difference with minimal work. But there's also a chance that this experiment will suggest other solutions to the problem. We've learned a lot more about how online communities operate since the privilege system was invented. Indeed, other community platforms learned from the Stack Exchange model to refine the concepts:

• Codidact grants voting based on a quality threshold rather than a generalized reputation score.
• Discourse begins trusting users after they've done a bit of reading.
• TopAnswers allows members of the community to vote (or "star") more posts based on the number of stars received.

These are very different ways of determining when a new user can be trusted. I have significant experience with Discourse's Trust Level system and it works incredibly well for our community. While forums aren't the same as Q&A, requiring reading rather than posting seems a better way to bring people into a community. Removing the reputation gate to voting could allow better (or at least different) gates to be considered.

It's extremely unlikely this change will solve Stack Exchange problems. It's also unlikely the change will destroy Stack Exchange communities. As important as the privilege/reputation system is for those of us who deeply interested in online community platforms, the details don't really register for most new users. It's the accumulation of good incentives that create good communities.

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[^1]: We tend to think of crises as fast moving: tsunami, stock market crash, terrorist attack, etc. If you are facing a slow-moving crisis, you will find it much harder to raise the red flag since people don't usually feel the pain until it's too late to do anything about it. I'm obviously writing now because I believe there is still time to make changes that will keep Stack Exchange afloat.

[^2]: Note that the questions in the sample had a positive score and weren't closed or deleted in the 30 days after asking.

[^3]: Some might ask why encouraging a second question is valuable if we already have too many questions on the sites. I'd suggest that asking questions is a skill. I don't have proof, but I suspect the second question is almost always better than the first. I expect asking is also a path toward answering in the future.

[^4]: From experience I know someone reading this is thinking of a recent question that strayed into the mindless fun zone and would love to tell me about it. Don't bother. If you ask 100 people who have heard of Stack Exchange but haven't contributed whether fun questions are allowed, I'd be shocked if fewer then 99 said anything less than "hell no!"

Answer 14

Removing the reputation barrier to voting for all users is a change we feel will lead to more users being able to indicate post quality and usefulness, but we recognize that it will require a lot of care to ensure that we are educating voters about when to vote and encouraging them to follow acceptable voting practices while also preventing or removing votes that were cast inappropriately.

I can't say that SE has a good track record in educating users. I am not saying it is not possible, but so far most of the users in the network are poorly educated when it comes to how sites function, what is their purpose, which questions are on topic and which not. Most of the time users cannot even ask the question on the right site, so I am pretty skeptical that educating will work.

But main problem is not education, nor how you will do that. You are approaching this purely from the perspective of "good" users and problems which can arise when genuine users will use the sites where there is no reputation limit to voting.

Main problem are bad actors and the damage they could do to the sites, because there will be bad actors. And in quantities you will not be able to cater for.

Besides possible abuse with upvotes, there is also possible abuse with downvoting. I am less concerned with ability to downvote as this could be beneficial for question moderation on smaller sites, where you may have a number of otherwise experienced users that just don't have appropriate reputation on some sites in the network.

I am more concerned about removing reputation cost for downvoting answers which opens doors for revenge downvoting on answers. Now, this is not such an issue with answers that have plenty of upvotes, but on smaller sites where there are only handful of votes on answers this could be a real problem for answers that are of high quality but were being picked as a target. And you will not be able to catch and reverse all such downvotes.

At the end this might make people more reluctant to participate in moderation activities and this is what is your end goal.

Answer 15

If you only do this for engagement, why not show the upvotes from low-rep users only to themselves (shadow-ban-like)?

Possibly with a tiny popup explaining that their upvotes won't be visible to others until they gain X reputation (whether this should retroactively apply past upvotes is up to discussion).

This precludes any curation quality issues.

Answer 16

Is SE prepared to make any commitment about the amount of developer time that will be allocated to building new tools to address the specific concerns raised by moderators (and users) about this change, based on feedback from the sites involved in the experiment?

This would influence my degree of enthusiasm for contributing to such a pilot.

Answer 17

I think that such an experiment should come with severe reductions in the limits on voting for the users who gain voting privileges due to this (but not those who already have it). Maybe something like 50 40 upvotes (or whatever the current daily limit is) for a whole week, and the daily limit lowered to a fifth or a seventh of that. If the experiment doesn't prove disastrous in the first week or so, then the limit can be slowly raised, say by another 50 votes per week or so until either the experiment ends or the existing voting limits are reached.

This will lower the monitoring burden on the staff conducting this experiment and lower the potential impact if the experiment goes haywire.

Answer 18

I want to respond to a comment, but I feel the response is more generally applicable.

Insisting content creation is necessary to validate if someone is capable of using a privilege, is a model we want to move away from. It may have gotten us here but that doesn't mean it's a good model.

I actually roughly agree: the ability (and desire) to moderate is distinct from the ability to write good content, and it might not be the best idea to have content creation be the (only) criterion for moderation, as is currently the case.

However, what you're proposing here is to completely remove the criterion and not replacing it by anything.

So the question this experiment tries to answer is: "is this criterion better or worse than no criterion". I doubt that it's worse (at least on sites that are already struggling with quality control... which is most sites I've used). Creating some good content (or at least positively-received content) seems unlikely to be a net-negative criterion for being able to judge what good content looks like, even if it isn't a good criterion.

The better question to try to answer is: "is this criterion better or worse than some other criterion". This experiment would only give us information about that if our current criterion is actively harmful, which would make it worse than any criterion that provides any benefit whatsoever. But if it provides some benefit (however small), this wouldn't tell us how it compares to other possible criteria.

A better criterion might be to somehow "educate users on what to upvote, what to downvote and what not to upvote or downvote" (and possibly also including a test to make sure they actually read any of that and understand it).

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I suppose we might also have different priorities when it comes to judging what's "good". You seem to be largely/primarily motivated by the "hope to spur participation and engagement", whereas I care more about retaining and improving quality, even if that means limiting participation.

On that note, you seem (for a long time now) to be moving away from the model of a limited number of users creating a Q&A to be passively used by a large number of users, and moving more towards trying to maximise the number and degree of engagement of active participants. There are already many, many sites focusing on the latter, but quite few focusing on the former.

I suppose the question is also then how you'd judge the results. If there's a slight decrease in quality, but there are more votes, would that be considered a success?

As a side note: the score of a post could skew people's perspective on the quality of that post. It's not inconceivable that people think quality improved simply as a result of new users upvoting things more and there thus being fewer negatively-scored posts. I'm not sure it's even possible to avoid that, without making people aware of their potential bias ahead of time (but that creates other problems).

Answer 19

I was going to post this as a comment, but I decided to post as an answer instead to try to get more visibility to this issue.
Forgive me if others already mentioned this and/or if I am missing something obvious.

Isn't this "test" virtually the same thing that was attempted on GenAI and caused an incredible amount of backslash??

What would be different this time? What made the company believe that something like a proposal that already caused a lot of negative feedback in the past (even if it was later revealed to be a partial misunderstanding due to poor wording) would be received positively now? Didn't the users already point out all the mess this would cause back then?

To put this into context:

I am very opposed to setting a 1 rep threshold for up and down voting because these have an implication across the network. Unless you plan to exclude GenAI from granting the linked account reputation bonus, this could negatively impact other sites by granting users who have no or limited understanding of the system or the network with additional powers.
Thomas Owens, GenAI

One major concern that I (and likely others) share is that this may (and likely will) lead to voting rings and (rule breaking) sockpuppet accounts. As an added measure to prevent the effects of that spilling over to other sites, can that bonus be disabled, please?
cocomac, this post

I'll leave finding the other overlapping answers as an exercise for the reader.

If I just read this post without any further context I am left asking myself if anyone in the company read that discussion again before posting this? It got "shot down" when we were talking about a single and new site, and now we are back at arguing if it should be made for multiple existing sites at the same time?

I would also wonder why wasn't the association bonus - something users already warned you about - mentioned by design this time, and if we really needed cocomac to mention it again before someone remembered to address it here.

But then when actively asked about that Catija mentioned that:

We've had several discussions both with Mods and internally about the Association Bonus and we're definitely thinking about it. Based on my last conversation about it, we see several options for this and have documentation of those options.

Based on this, and further comments below it appears that the issue was internally mentioned. But then why did you choose to not include it in the summary when you already knew how important it was for some users? That line should have been posted from the start, and preceded by a "We remember your concerns when a similar test was proposed for GenAI so we are currently discussing a solution so that said problem can be circumvented".

Again, I get your attempts to make things short and easier to read but... you really have to work on how you communicate things and what to keep/drop.

Answer 20

This experiment identifies a discrepancy between "outcomes that benefit StackOverflow Inc." and "outcomes that benefit StackExchange Users", in a way that is going to make it hard for mods to trust any results of the site test.

Let me explain.

This question is posited as "would lowering voting thresholds increase engagement". But engagement, as in "users spending more time on the site", is not what most SEs need. Most of the SEs I participate in need more quality questions and answers.

So from a perspective of mods and other users of SE, what we'll want to know is "does being able to vote sooner result in users posting their first question/answer sooner, and how good are those questions/answers?" There is absolutely no reason to believe that it will, given that they haven't posted already, but I could be pleasantly surprised.

There are four possible outcomes for this test:

1. No change in behavior
2. Low-rep users do lots of voting but don't post
3. Low-rep users post more, but the posts are low-quality
4. Low-rep users post more, and the posts are high-quality

Of the above, outcomes 2 and 3 can be actually harmful to many or most SE sites' usability; they are certainly not clearly "successful" outcomes.

In contrast to this experiment, I'd be interested in one where we lowered the threshold required to comment. I can see a much more direct line from commenting to answering/asking than from voting to posting.

Another experiment that we could try would be to eliminate the "canonical questions rule", which is one of the major things driving the decline in user posting activity. As an SE ages, it gets harder and harder to ask an actually "new" question, so why bother?

Answer 21

You folks (owners and operators of StackExchange and StackOverflow) seem to have confused the Stack sites with a social network. That's wrong. It's as wrong as those who confuse the Stack sites with forums.

The Stack sites are about knowledge, not about random interactions with people. Voting on the Stack sites is not about social interaction. It is about evaluating content.

Given that, increasing user activity just to have more activity is pointless.

Would you suggest that Wikipedia encourage edits to articles just to have more activity? I'd hope not. On Wikipedia, you want directed activity to improve the content - not random edits just to generate activity.

Just so with the Stack sites. You want directed activity to improve the content and generate new content.

Because you are looking at the Stack sites as something they are not, you are also looking at the wrong metrics.

This is the the question you should be asking:

How many people per day are finding the information they need on the Stack sites?

Follow that up with:

Has the number of successful searches increased or decreased over the years?

From the publicly available data, it is clear that activity is dropping.

Other data may show an entirely different picture, but only the company behind the Stack sites can view that data - that's number of page views per day, number of pages views by new and returning people, and time spent on page.

That information would tell you if the Stack sites are still providing information to people.

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For nearly any subject, there's a certain basic level of information that you need to be able to work in that area. Once you've covered the basics, it becomes far more difficult to find good (general) questions and good (general) answers - you start getting into details and questions specific to a particular usage. Those more specific questions will attract fewer votes and fewer answers (also with fewer votes.) They require more experience to understand and more experience to answer - and most people capable of understanding and writing such detail questions on a particular subject will be capable of answering their own questions without ever asking anyone for help.

Once you've gotten a huge base of basic questions, activity (creation of new content) will slow down.

When activity slows down, you need to take a good look at your content and the viewing patterns and see whether people are simply finding the information they need (loads of new people viewing existing content for extended periods or people returning with long view times) or if your site has become irrelevant (no new people visiting or short, one-time visits with no returns.)

Activity (new questions/answers, voting) are certainly down - the linked SEDE queries clearly show dropping numbers of new questions and answers for years. The information needed to see if Stack is still relevant is, however, not available through SEDE. The company needs to look at that, preferably while making the numbers and the analysis public.

• Looking at the activity alone is not sufficient.
• Looking at the Stack sites as you would a social network is wrong.
• Look at details relevant to a knowledge repository (what the Stack system is supposed to be) to see if the Stack sites are still relevant before making random changes to what may be the wrong parameters.

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Views per day is what drives your advertising revenue. If I suddenly started using up my voting quota every day, it wouldn't do your revenue any good - I'm already there every day, viewing dozens if not hundreds of questions and answers along with the ads.

Increased activity does not equate to more ad views and ad revenue - for that you need more viewers.

Are there sufficient viewers on the Stack system?

I don't know, but I seriously hope that the Stack owners can find out.

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Out of curiousity, I checked the "Impact" rating on my Electrical Engineering stack page.

It says I've "reached" 2.3 million people. The pop-up says that's an estimate of the number of times my answers have been read based on how often the questions I have answered have been read.

I have 67,838 reputation points on that site. To simplify the math, assume each point came from an upvote (10 points.) That's that 6783 people who have voted on my answers. That means that only one person in 339 bothers to vote. It also means that the real activity (people reading existing questions and answers) on the site is over 300 times more than just the voting activity suggests.

This is, of course, just a quick look at a single data point.

I'd suggest that the folks operating the Stack system could look at aggregate numbers and come up with a better number for how many times existing questions and answers are read as opposed to how often people "interact" with the system - and I'd bet that the number of passive readers will drastically outnumber the "interactions" that the Stack operators are looking at.

The trend of the passive readers is what they need to be looking at - that's where the "eyeballs" for the ad revenue come from.

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For a further comparison, I have a blog with a really simple voting system - users are not required to log in to vote on posts.

Since May of this year, there have been less than 100 votes (positive and negative.) That's in comparison to over 13000 page views.

That's a ratio of 130 views to 1 interaction - and that's where interactions are truly no effort for the readers.

As I mentioned in an answer on the Writing stack, people come looking for information - they are doing something and need information. They find it on my blog (or on some Stack) and return to what they were doing. They are concentrating on the task and are not interested in the least in "interacting." They have something to do, and they want (or need) to get back to it. I know this because I do it myself - need some obscure bit of info, search, find, return to task.

You need to look at what all those "passive" consumers are doing and stop concentrating on interaction.

Answer 22

...the core concept behind all of them is to prevent misuse and protect the perceived value of the content on the sites...

Let me focus on the core concept. Misuse is surely a concern for voting but another maybe underrated concern should be experience. Inexperienced voters could destroy the perceived value of the content on the sites by various actions including:

• voting based on already existing votes or reputation of a content creator instead of voting based on content
• voting based on a wrongful or missing understanding of the content and the context
• voting based on sympathy with the contributors situation
• voting not based on anything substantial (random noise)

and while this is true for all kind of votes, it may occur on a much larger scale with low reputation users. It doesn't require bad intent, so it doesn't represent an abuse, but still more votes of lower quality could actually be harmful instead of beneficial for the platform.

I therefore urge you to develop a success metric that directly measures how positive or negative contributions of increased amounts of votes impact the quality of the voting as best as possible.

And I advise to also try different thresholds and not simply lowering it to 1 in order to test if there maybe is an optimum somewhere. I think there might be.

Finally it doesn't necessarily need to be tied to reputation, maybe there are other ways to define how much weight a vote should have. And I think it's not so trivial to come up with a really useful metric for estimating the direct impact of this change on the quality of voting. In general, we need the right kind of people to vote on the right kind of content in order to maximize the value of voting, I think. Not sure how that can be achieved.

Answer 23

Setting guidance before the test that will help us identify cases where rolling back the changes or making other adjustments are necessary."

1. so rolling things back (after the experiment ends) will be a possibility?
2. is it just rolling back the votes, or also the knock-on effects of people using privileges they gained as a result of the change, such as commenting (imagine all the noise), doing reviews, making edits without review, etc.?
3. if it's possible, what's the rationale for rolling back not being a given (instead of a decision point), given that this is just an experiment?

Answer 24

While not per se against this experiment, I always had the idea that the threshold to vote was to prevent against "voting rings" where a user creates two accounts and then these accounts upvote each others posts.

While such rings of course still can occur, for example if one of the accounts gives a proper answer or asks a good question, it thus means one should at least put a (small) amount of effort into it before the carrousel starts.

If we automatically give voting rights when registering a user, it thus is quite easy to set up such a ring, even in an (almost) fully automated way. Whereas detecting and eventually removing the rings is less trivial.

Answer 25

This is just opening the flood-gates to users with no clue how the system works deciding on a whim, or mere capricious action, how a question is received; whilst having zero knowledge of how the SE structure is designed to work.

Unlike Facebook, the grumpy face icon posts don't just fall off the bottom of the interest list after a day or two, to never be seen again. This affects long-term visibility & usefulness as a future resource.

I'm really not sure about this idea, to put it politely.

I already think 125 rep is too low.
I would support that a consolidated network rep of maybe >50k could allow low rep users who have small sites to have additional privileges granted as a 'bigger' association bonus. https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/384293/276027 but I have no desire to see 'open season' declared.

Personally, on sites I have lower rep & less frequent engagement, or topics about which I have less knowledge, I am far more circumspect about my own voting; only voting when Q or A is clear to me with my limited grasp of a topic. I don't vote on things I don't understand.
Nor do I reflexively VTC as unclear - "Just because you don't understand something does not automatically make it unclear."

I have serious doubts new users would be so considerate.

Answer 26

Keep the old thresholds for meta

The ability to post on meta on most sites is locked behind 5 rep (except if you're asking about your post). Even users with five times that amount tend to not understand what meta is about, based on what meta posts they're creating (mostly questions that they couldn't ask on the main site, being question banned). I would prefer if we kept voting to either its original thresholds or at least something that's higher than 1 rep to keep meta as a platform for active users of the site.

For example, by coincidence, I saw a meta post of mine ended up on Hacker News (and from there, Reddit), and it ended up with a lot of views. However, reading the comments on Hacker News, most of the users were talking about Stack Overflow, which was not the site I posted on. I wouldn't want anyone to be voting on my post based on their opinions of what should happen on Stack Overflow.

Answer 27

Votes are something very important in the SE system. If SE is willing to reduce the rep requirement to upvote/downvote to the bare minimum (1 rep), I feel it's time now that all users get to see vote count of posts (number of upvotes and downvotes) regardless of rep.

Related request Show the vote split by default

Answer 28

If the rep barrier will be removed, maybe add a time barrier to prevent (some) sockpuppets?

• Either based on the age of the account ("created at least 1 month ago")
• and/or based on participation ("visited the site on at least 10 distinct days")

Of course the actual limits are to be decided.

That way a user cannot quickly create a sockpuppet account to upvote their own posts, but (provided the limits are not too high) a new real user can soon participate.

Answer 29

I have concerns about how malicious users could exploit this change, but SE has heard those from me and many other mods already. In the end this will come down to how much effort SE will spend on mod tools and automated mechanisms to prevent abuse. I think most of this is fixable, it's just a lot of work. So in this answer I'll focus only on why I think that, if it can be done safely this change could be a good idea.

I do think it is worth to try this because the decline in voting is a fundamental threat to the Q&A model. Depending on which site and which tag on larger sites you post, voting volume in general can be extremely low. It's not unusual to post a reasonable answer or question and receive no votes at all. This is bad in terms of motivating users to post content, if nobody votes on it at all. It also means that essentially no real curation is happening there, you don't get any information what the community actually thinks about those posts. Okay, some of these are just meh posts and zero is an acceptable score for them, but for many of them it's just as if the voting system doesn't exist because nobody bothers to use it there. They are reasonably good or bad posts, probably not obviously excellent nor obviously terrible and they likely require some domain knowledge to distinguish if they're on the good or the bad side.

Post scores need a minimum level of voting activity to work. Giving more users the ability to vote will likely help with that and in the end add more signal to the post scores.

Answer 30

We have collected user research over the years indicating that many people have struggled to participate because they feel the restrictions about who can vote are too limiting and prevents them from indicating when questions or answers are good or bad.

That's assuming that they know when answers are good or bad. We have no clue if they know anything about site conventions or rules; the way that they demonstrate that they do is through getting reputation.

Voting is a major way that communities enforce their community expectations, and allowing people who don't know those to vote will substantially undermine that. It's like a country opening up voting to anyone in the world whether they live there or not.

It's already easy enough to abuse the voting system. Opening it up to people who know nothing about the site would remove one of the most important safeguards against abusive voting. For example, it would make sock puppetry and voting rings vastly easier to set up.

Also, most people with 1 rep have not contributed a single question, answer, or approved edit. That means that they aren't really invested in the site and won't vote in a way that's in the site's best interest.