View vote count privilege should be MUCH easier to gain

Question

Closely related: Why privilege to view vote counts?

The previous question explains why this is a privilege and not a feature, though I understand the argument I don't think it is "enough" for one argument in particular:

Seeing the vote count is very valuable information to asses the quality of an answer.

Why? Because if an answer has 10 up-votes and 8 down-votes, it will score 2 and seem like a fairly good answer while it is actually a very polemic one.

Actually, you would have to be very careful with that answer since, in a way, down-votes "count more" that up-votes since they carry rep lost.

I would suggest then (considering that the operation is expensive):

• Leave the privilege as it is for users over 1000, they will able to request any time (as is).
• Give a new privilege to logged in users with a score of 1* or more.
  • Once an hour* allow them to see the vote count of the question/answer**.
  • (Optional) Allow this only if the question/answer has down-votes.
  • (Optional) Allow this for only one post every hour.

Opinions on the matter? Do you think it is reasonable? Useful?

I think the voting system is an essencial part of SO's user experiences, and thus, being such a valuable information, shouldn't be limited "so much" and should be available to "everyone".

Thanks in advance!

Note: The solutions I suggested are just that, suggestion, the main point is getting this feature closer to the new comer.

^{* Are completely open to suggestion
** Maybe only for answers}

Answer 1

I find the split so useful that I would argue that anybody should be able to view it, even anonymous users. An answer that has 28/25 votes must be unbelievably bad, but to an anonymous visitor that isn't apparent. The only hope is that there is some very high-voted comment saying how bad it is.

Jeff's answer here suggests that this is performance related because the total vote count is denormalized and the split needs to be computed via an aggregate. I understand that, but so what? It seems extremely straightforward to denormalize the up- and down-vote subtotals instead and make the total score a simple computation either client side or server side. I can't see the fundamental barrier to making this happen. Both cletus and Jon Skeet mentioned this with no response from Jeff.

The other comment from Jeff is that 1) 98% of the time the total is all upvotes, and 2) that desiring to see the split is prurient in nature. To 1) I'd say I agree, but a) you can't know when you're in that 2% case unless you have the rep, and b) obviously it's the 2% case that matters to us. To 2) I'd say that that is ridiculous. The ratio of upvotes to downvotes is a far better measure of quality than total score. It is not prurient to want to see that information for a technical answer. I might agree with the sentiment for questions.

Answer 2

The vote counts actually are visible to everyone via the API. Here is an example in Python (version 2.6 or 2.7). Call with either a link to a question or a link to an answer as command line argument, and you'll get the vote counts. The link to api.stackoverflow.com is hard-coded, so this version only works for the main SO site. And excuse the low code quality...

#!/usr/bin/env python

from urllib2 import urlopen
from urllib import urlencode
from urlparse import urlparse
import zlib
import json
import sys

def get(action, **params):
    response = urlopen("http://api.stackoverflow.com/1.0/" +
                       action + "?" + urlencode(params))
    response = zlib.decompress(response.read(), 31)
    return json.loads(response.decode("utf-8"))

if len(sys.argv) < 2:
    print "Usage: %s <link-to-question-or-answer>"
    sys.exit(1)

path = urlparse(sys.argv[1]).path.strip("/").split("/")
ids = [component for component in path if component.isdigit()]
s = [None, "questions", "answers"][len(ids)]
r = get("/".join((s, ids[-1])))[s][0]
print "Up: %(up_vote_count)i, down: %(down_vote_count)i" % r