Arbitrary Negatives Considered Harmful

Question

I recently answered a somewhat subjective question with what I genuinely hope was good advice. It got downvoted, which is fine, except that I have no idea why.

I understand that voting is probably secret to encourage honesty, but I'm wondering if there is any intent to address the votes with no apparent basis. For example, would it be at all useful to prompt for an optional (or even mandatory) explanation when voting?

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The idea would be for the comment to be either mandatory or strongly suggested, but anonymous by default. This lets people downvote anonymously but still offer some basis. And if the stated reason is dumb, well, then that would speak for itself.

Answer 1

I've seen one effect. I used to give a comment on most of my downvotes, until one poster reacted by sifting through my recent posts, and downvoting nearly every answer I had made in the past 2 weeks--even some answers already classified as "Good Answer". My objections weren't abusive and usually contained enough information to indicate where I thought the answer got off track.

Of course I think an answer is to allow non-trackable comments on downvotes. Possibly change the name of this comment to "suggestion"--so that it even points at the idea of being helpful rather than anything else.

In the case of suggestions about an answer, perhaps the user could delete this when they got enough RTFMs or equivalents--or perhaps suggestions could be voted on, like comments. So it's RTFMx8 (and would take up less space.)

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EDIT:  If you like the idea of an anonymous suggestion, the feature is being discussed here: Encouraging people to explain down-votes, please upvote Peter Mortensen's answer.

Answer 2

There was a recent change implemented that suggests on down-vote to leave a comment as to why. You probably won't see this go much further than this because all of the voting is supposed to be 100% anonymous to the users unless there is a comment (+1 or -1) type of thing going on...

You could always add a comment such as "why the downvote?" For things that are fairly discussion based/oriented, you can mark your answer as community wiki to prevent the rep damage.

You also could be getting gamed a bit, where other folks who have answered the question voted yours down to push theirs above yours.

Answer 3

I've just seen the suggestion. It needs to permit an anonymous comment, or it won't get used very often.

I personally would like to find out whether there are good reasons my answers are being downvoted. If the downvote was for no good reason then we'll get no better comments than "because I felt like it", or something less polite. But we can ignore those comments if we also get some good, brief reasons for the downvote.

When we do, we may find that there's a group of downvotes that happen because people don't understand what downvotes are for. In that case, we can improve the FAQ to educate future new users. I (for one) may be getting downvotes because people think I'm being mean (like I ever do that). In that case, I can decide to be nicer (or not).

But we can't do anything based on ignorance.

Answer 4

I figure it this way, you can't please everyone. If you get net positive votes, that's the best you can hope for. I think the isolated down vote is basically meaningless and unless I get several, I didn't do anything wrong.

There are so many reasons people cast down-votes that are not related at all to the quality of the answer (and in my opinion against the spirit of the community) like down vote so their answer goes above yours, down vote for personal reasons (not to say anyone does not love you personally :) or just down vote to be difficult.

Per comment: I don't think they are necessary. If you're a constant, good contributor, your rep will increase. If you get mired down in thinking about every +/- 2 swing you get, you will drive yourself crazy.

Answer 5

This has gone around many times on UV, and I still think it's a bad idea. People are aware that they can leave a comment explaining the down vote if they so choose. The only possible reason to require it would be to try and prevent gaming, which is futile. If you aren't requiring comments, then you need be be very certain that your mechanism for encouraging them doesn't discourage voting on the whole. (Anonymous) voting is the lifeblood of the reputation system, and it must continue to flow.

My thoughts (bullet-points for easy consumption):

• Requiring a comment doesn't require it to make sense. At best, it'll be a good reason which a thoughtful person would make without being compelled to. At worst, it'll be a thinly veiled effort to make gaming seem like legitimate objections.
• When someone thinks they've been downvoted without "good reason", they will want something to be done about it. We'll very quickly get to meta-moderation, voting whether one another's votes were justified to begin with, which will leave to even more enflamed tempers, calls for punitive or corrective measures, and plain old fashioned retaliation (i.e. more gaming).
• All in all, the fact that downvotes hurt the voter half as much as they recipient is a fine system for keeping downvotes in check.

Eliminating anonymous votes by requiring comments is, in my opinion, more problematic than leaving the system in place. It may not be perfect, but nothing is.