Can we readdress the reputation penalty for downvoting answers?

Question

I believe it is time to readdress the penalty to downvote an answer. At one point it may have served a purpose but I don't believe that is true anymore. My motivation comes from search results pointing to SO only to be greeted by a question with multiple answers and half or more are useless. These answers carry scores of 0 when they should be buried in the background. From Privileges:

When you vote down, you are nudging that content "down" the page, so it will be seen by fewer people. Voting down answers is not something we want you to take lightly, so it is not free.

A good discussion happened here before. But the logic seems to have passed the network by as it has grown.

With the tremendous amount of users and content available on the Stack Exchange network there are substandard posts being added all the time. Some are AI generated, some are ignorantly generated, some are just plain wrong. Using flags places a burden on moderators to act when a simple downvote will move the post out of sight. The review queues constantly show red now. This would allow the community to moderate itself.

If a user posts a bad question or answer and the community votes it down, the user can elect to delete it and clean up the site. Abuses of the voting system are detected and corrected with tools already in place.

An unpopular "happy medium" could be enforce a -1 rep penalty for a downvote on a question or answer unless a comment is added to help the poster. I know this is unpopular and I would suggest simply eliminating the penalty.

Answer 1

I'd put it another way - I'd like my downvotes to have an effect. I'm taking a potential 1 reputation loss in the expectation that the user ideally will edit their post into shape, which means I get back my 1 rep, the poster I downvoted gets 2 rep back and a 10 rep bonus, and we end up with a better post.

The other possibilities are the post is deleted, either by the community (or moderator) or by the user, in which case, you temporarily 'spent' one reputation you got back to clean up the site.

Finally, you downvoted, and the post is still there. If you did it right, it's lower in the list with the right sort. If you didn't, and other people upvoted it, it's a learning opportunity.

And frankly - if you don't think you want to spend the reputation to downvote, it is fine. Meta moderation tasks are spread throughout the community. Someone else will.

Answer 2

The system already requires 125 reputation to downvote. That's something like 4% of Stack Overflow user accounts, and represents a non-trivial investment in a site and in the Stack Exchange model. My guess is that users aren't really avoiding downvotes on answers because of the reputation penalty. Rather, they just aren't downvoting answers, because they don't see it as a part of their responsibility as a community member in good standing who wants to improve the site.

This is a social, "site culture" problem rather than a technical one.

Aside from that, the much greater problem IMO is inertia. Answers need to get to -1 before delete votes become accessible, and then a consensus needs to emerge from among the far smaller pool of users who may cast answer deletion votes (and there is no explicit system for these users to advertise such votes to each other; they must separately organize if they want to consider such actions, and need to take care to do so in a way that clears the anti-vote-fraud standards). Meanwhile, I have seen terrible, utterly wrong answers with three-digit scores before, when the question was popular enough. In some of these cases I was dismayed to find myself casting the first downvote, many years later.

Not to mention all the duplicate and overlapping answers. Moderators often won't help with these because, as I understood the explanation, it would be unfair to choose one version of the duplicate answer over the other, and deprive one party of all that reputation, when the answers were posted within a few minutes of each other, many years ago. (But on the other hand, it is apparently completely fair that an edit can permanently improve the vote trajectory of an answer on a popular question - or of a question about a common problem - and the editor gets at most 2 rep from this.)

In short: the best work comes from people who don't care about reputation; and for those who do, the problems with the system are far too fundamental for a proposal like "remove the 1 rep penalty for downvoting answers" to move the needle in any discernible way.

Answer 3

At one point it may have served a purpose but I don't believe that is true anymore

Part of the purpose to prevent users from abusing/overusing the downvote button. I think that you can imagine plenty of ways someone could do that. I don't see why this purpose doesn't still apply.

These answers carry scores of 0 when they should be buried in the background.

There are 2 ways to bury an answer in the background. Either you could downvote the bad answer or upvote the good one (or ideally do both).

Abuses of the voting system are detected and corrected with tools already in place

Those mainly detect things like serial voting, which isn't all the downvote penalty is meant to prevent. Some if is just trigger happy downvoting, or downvoting all answers in Tag X, etc. This is not caught by any tool that I know of.

Here's the other option though:1 reputation isn't all that much. On SO, you have about 2,800 reputation. That's 2,800 downvotes worth. One of your posts getting upvoted is worth 10 downvotes. Downvotes on answers likely don't have a meaningful impact on most peoples reputation. In addition, many answers get fixed up or deleted, so you get your 1 reputation back. And ultimately, if someone doesn't want to downvote answers because of this, there are plenty of other SO users who will.

Answer 4

I would suggest simply eliminating the penalty

Removing the penalty (and reputation threshold) outright has not been well-received and the idea was abandoned:

• If more users could vote, would they engage more? Testing 1 reputation voting on some sites
• We will launch the 1-rep voting experiment on Stack Overflow for 4–6 weeks, along with account creation prompts
• Pausing the 1-rep voting experiment on Stack Overflow: reflecting on the feedback and rethinking the approach

unless a comment is added to help the poster

Who or what judges whether the comment I add can help the poster? Or is even intended to do so? Or will not get flagged and deleted by someone before the OP sees it? Anyway, the concept of forcing people (or rewarding them) for explaining down-votes has been a popular idea for almost as long as the network has existed, but I think that the cons continue to outweigh the pros:

• Encouraging people to explain downvotes

If my down-vote leads to the user fixing the answer, great! This happens whether or not I add a comment. If they don't fix it, I get my 1 point back if/when the answer is deleted - which I hope would happen since I'm probably not the only person who found the answer worthy of a down-vote.

And, selfishly, I don't want to have a comment there because I don't want additional notifications when those comments are replied to or the answer is updated as a result (presumably, I'd be expected to undo my down-vote or even change it to up). I'm sure we've all experienced adding comments explaining a deficiency in an answer, where they are usually ignored, or the OP disagrees, and sometimes they just get downright belligerent and even engage in revenge voting.