Why are votes per post on the decrease (what can we do to improve this)?

Question

I just wrote this totally nasty query on data.se (same query including all community wiki questions).

It is ... complicated but this is what it looks at:

• It splits up data in to 1 month chunks (2009 - 2011)
• It counts questions, answers and votes during the month for those questions and answers.

Voting drives the economy of Stack Overflow, this trend of decreased voting can not be helping.

Why do you think we are seeing this trend? What can we do to help increase voting?

Answer 1

Show the User voting behavior to the community as an indicator of the User civic duty-ness

I'd like to see a voting rate indicator like the accept rate on the user profile.

This should reflect the voting behavior of the user based on the following factors:

1. Time spent on the site (visits, questions views, questions asked)
2. Number of upvotes/downvotes
3. Reps? (more reps, less relaxed checks or viceversa?)

This could be indicated with some fancy arrows (green, yellow, red) or a more aggressive percentage.

The rationale is something like this:
We are aware that you spend a lot of time on our network but your upvotes/downvotes rate kinda sucks, do you mind to vote more?

This indicator should be backed with a proper section allowing the user to check his/her voting stats and avoiding MSO questions like I'm keeping voting up but my arrow is still red, why?.

I'm curious to see this metric, as a great upvoter, I'd like to see some data about my clicks rate during these months here on SE.

I haven't reflected at all of any possible drawback of this proposal, I'm just throwing an Idea that could be horrible or hard to implement.

Update:
there's a cool topvoters new feature here

Update2:
and a more fine grained voting stats discussed here!

Answer 2

The raw number of votes is increasing, so I think what you're seeing is either:

1. Even though there are more users, they are hitting the 30 vote/day cap.
2. People are not seeing as many % of the posts as they used to be and what they are seeing is of declining quality (partially supported by the fact that answers/question is on a slow downward trend).

To counteract these:

1. Raise the number of votes/day to 45 (or some other higher value).
2. Increase the time between new questions for new and low-rep users. (If we cut down on the low-quality questions, people will see more of the high quality questions, which they are more inclined to vote on because downvoting charges a penalty).

Answer 3

One very simple small idea would be to make the Civic Duty badge able to be earned multiple times.

Answer 4

Warning: graph- and speculation-heavy post follows.

I don't know what happened, but that trend has been reversed:

After a low of ~1.9 votes/post in March of 2011, the rate has settled into a range between 2.6 and 2.8.

---

That got me thinking about the network as a whole. For instance, I looked at the perceived drop in quality on Digital Signal Processing and concluded that a steady drop in voting was the culprit. Either good contributors are less motivated to ask, and answer questions or posts with few votes come off as lower quality. (Or both!)

What's a healthy ratio of votes to post? Should a large drop, such as SO saw from 2009 to 2011, concern us? To answer those questions, I queried our database for votes/post, total views, and total posts. I've included upvotes, downvotes, and accept votes because these have the greatest impact on participation. I'm using views as a loose proxy for success. (That's not really fair to smaller topics, such as Poker, but we take that into account when evaluating sites.)

This graph shows votes/post on the vertical axis and the horizontal axis is log scale views. The bubbles represent total number of posts:

The left side of the graph is populated by sites we closed and the right side is dominated by Stack Overflow. Taking out those exceptional sites we get this:

So there's a big cluster of beta sites that get between 2 1/2 and 6 votes per post. On the right side we have some graduated sites with low voting and a handful (Skeptics, Science Fiction & Fantasy, RPG, Programmers, CS Theory, TeX, MathOverflow, Travel, and Mathematica) with v/p north of 5 1/2. There are also a number of graduated sites that aren't extreme in either direction.

Some of the sites on the high side of this metric (Skeptics, MathOverflow, and CS Theory, in particular) suggest that votes per post is a measure of "degree of difficulty" in writing questions and answers on a particular site. On Skeptics, if you don't do a good job of establishing your claim as notable, your question will be closed. If you don't follow the rules on using sources, your answer will be deleted. It's probably our most demanding site. Therefore, many people vote on the site without contributing much in the way of posts.

On Stack Overflow, we see the problem with success. There are far more posts submitted than anyone could hope to keep up with. At best, you might be able to keep up with the questions on a popular tag, such as python...maybe. So we can easily see why so many posts get no votes at all. Anecdotally, that's a problem for people who started contributing later in the game; only exceptional posts gather many votes.

Conclusion

Tentatively, I suggest that different sites will have different "steady state" levels of voting. Drops in voting, such as SO saw between the start of 2009 and 2011, should be concerning for those of us watching particular sites. When this sort of decline is observed, steps should be taken to reverse the trend.

Now, the question remains: what reversed the trend on Stack Overflow? Some candidate changes:

• Autodeletion of month- and year-old questions. (hat tip: gnat)
• Autodownvotes of questions closed as OT and NARQ. (hat tip: Shog9)

Changes that came a bit late to explain the turnaround:

• Increase in the daily voting limit for questions. (March 2011)
• Free downvotes on questions. (March 2011)
• Vox Populi. (August 2011)

Answer 5

Maybe it's because fun/subjective questions are becoming less and less allowed over time, such as this one.

Those kind of questions have probably thousand of times the votes of a normal question (probably more than enough to screw the average votes per post on all questions). Since they are usually CW, maybe you can try to only count non-CW votes in your query and see if it makes a difference?

Answer 6

Badge

Stealing slightly from jjnguy, we have a badge for hitting the daily vote cap (Suffrage) once, but what about on several days, or lots of days? As such, I propose a silver and a gold badge for voting a lot. Here's an example of what one might look like:

For hitting the daily vote cap on 150 days.

Since badges are designed to encourage positive behaviour on the site, it makes sense to have a badge for voting a lot. I've hit the daily vote cap fairly often.

Potential downsides:

1. This doesn't guarantee quality voting. That's where you have sportsmanship etc.
2. This will have the same effect as the electorate badge, where people will vote like crazy on everything in sight.

Computer Index Score -> Stackoverflow citizenship score

This is an extension of what systempuntoout is proposing, sort of, but changed.

Yes, I'm talking about this. Let's face it, the stackoverflow profile is accumulating a lot of statistics and information and there's lots we've all wanted to see in the moderator elections, in that little badge etc.

So, as an idea, I suggest we do a Microsoft: take all these metrics, give them a score out of 10, then take an average (or something) giving a total community rating score. Then display that on the profile. This would take into account all the rewarding badges, like sportsmanship, electorate etc.

In short, it's kinda like a stackoverflow citizenship test. It takes the need for all this extra information in the profile signature box away. You can factor things like accept rate into it too.

This would be in addition to the existing rep/badges. This is because rep/badges are for you, and this is how well you play in the team.

Upsides:

1. Reduces clutter.
2. Provides a simplified "niceness" indicator.
3. You'd still be able to see all the badges, votes, questions etc. Indeed, these stats could go under one of the profile tabs.
4. This information is being computed anyway, for the badges.
5. You could use it in moderator elections.
6. When you have another niceness statistic as demanded by meta, you just factor it in to this one.

Downsides:

1. Like all such statistics, its a face-value approximation, or a rough guide to how nicely you've played. Just like rep, basically.
2. Everyone will have an opinion on what should form part of said statistic and how much weight it should hold and nobody will be happy with the result.
3. I haven't made any proposal as to how these calculations should happen. I've just proposed an idea. So that would need to be worked out.
4. Probably some more.
5. The image is badly done and only slightly uses freehand circles. I'm sorry. I couldn't fit it all in in freehand without using a massive image. I hope the badge makes up for it, and my overuse of bold text and obnoxious formatting.

Thoughts? Opinions? Abuse? Questions? Waffles?

Answer 7

I would look to query figures like views as compared to votes, as well as vote spread - are we seeing a higher percentage of posts not get any votes at all (or more negative votes), skewing the results?

I might suggest some alternate theories to test for evidence:

• The number of vote worthy ('good') posts is decreasing as the membership ratio better comes to represent the industry (Alpha vs Vocational programmers).

• The number of duplicate and off topic posts is increasing as the number of truly new questions goes down (The Simpsons did it). I don't know enough about the workings of SO to know if your community ownership clause is catching those [closed] posts.

• The number of Google drive by questions (account with just one question) is rising, contributing to the previous two points?

Answer 8

I was trying to point out the same thing a month ago in this question and in this answer.

And at that time this is the comment I got from Waffle's:

"So you have a graph that proves that a question that was asked a second ago was viewed less than a question asked 3 years ago. What exactly does that prove?"

and

"I have no problem and any data helps out. However as it stands this proves nothing, if you could come up with an expected trend graph and show where we are dropping from the expected trend, it would be helpful. But as it stands all that this proves is that there is a long tail."

and from Jeff:

"I agree with waffles, this is simply a graph that says "over time, older things are viewed more". It's not particularly useful."

Does the same not apply to votes?

Isn't this just saying that over time posts get more votes? Where is the trend?

Answer 9

Just a hunch... but maybe people are just getting tired of voting?

Imagine you read dozens of questions and answers every day. When you're fresh and eager you read each in detail, upvoting those you find helpful. But... as time goes by, days pass, you take less time to read each answer and you don't upvote because you didn't consider it deeply enough.

I'm sure there are people here who are as fresh and upvoters as they used to be years ago when they first joined, but I'm also suspecting there are many others with the above "symptom".

Newcomers are not relevant, they might upvote the answer that solved their problems but it's really rare they check any other questions.

So the problem IMO is with the "inner circle" of members and the solution? Good question. Probably some of those members can answer this better. :)

Answer 10

I have no idea if this applies to the community at large, but as a newer user on the site I'm hesitant to down-vote other users who offer suggestions that may slightly miss the mark but aren't out-and-out wrong (especially if they have been on the site for a while or have high rep). I've also found myself less likely to vote-up an answer that is clearly correct but already has the highest score of the answers listed for a question.

On a related note, when is it appropriate to downvote? If somebody leaves an incorrect answer - not necessarily a "wrong" answer, but just "didn't answer my specific problem", should they be voted down?

I asked a question on SO earlier today. It's only my second question. The first response didn't apply - but I wasn't sure if it was my fault for not explaining well enough, or his fault for not reading thoroughly. Within moments another user had offered a suggest that fixed my problem. I'd upvoted his answer immediately (and later accepted it) but I hadn't considered downvoting the initial wrong answer from the other user.

Mostly I felt like it's sort of a dick move to down-vote a guy who tried to help me, but just missed the mark. He didn't leave bad advice, it just didn't apply to my question as I'd scoped it.

Answer 11

This is similar to this question to which this was my answer:

Another thing to consider is the change to the homepage algorithm so that it now show you new interesting but unanswered questions.

Once an answer (or two) gets two or three up-votes then the question will tend to disappear from the home page, reducing the number of people that see it thus reducing the voting chances.

Answer 12

I'm not saying that this is a good idea or that I agree with it...but how about reputation bonuses for voting up?

1 rep per upvote? 1 rep per 5 upvotes?

I think that would definitely increase voting on posts. (But I also think it would encourage voting on posts of lesser quality too much.)