Should questions closed as "not a real question" and "off topic" get an automatic downvote?

Question

We currently have five standard close reasons network wide:

• exact duplicate
  This question covers exactly the same ground as earlier questions on this topic; its answers may be merged with another identical question.

• off topic
  Questions on Stack Overflow are expected to generally relate to programming or software development in some way, within the scope defined in the faq.

• subjective and argumentative
  It's impossible to objectively answer this question; questions of this type are too open ended and usually lead to confrontation and argument.

• not a real question
  It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form.

• too localized
  This question would only be relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet.

After dealing with the recent influx of 1,000+ flags per day on Stack Overflow, I have come to believe that some of these close reasons, when invoked, should be followed by a downvote from community on the question.

Specifically:

• Not a Real Question
• Off Topic (excluding questions that get migrated elsewhere)

Maybe it's just flag fatigue, but I've seen a lot of users who really should know better -- not newbie 1 rep users, but users with hundreds or thousands of rep -- asking egregiously off topic and/or unanswerable questions.

Having community downvote these OT and NARQ questions at the time of close would accomplish a few things:

1. earlier tripping of our protection heuristics for new users, that is, no more asking 10 questions in a row that don't get downvoted, but all closed
2. a disincentive for users who feel they can "try the waters" and float egregiously off-topic or utterly vague questions in our community, at no risk
3. no more using up daily downvotes, at a cost of -1 rep, to the users who helped close these questions and genuinely feel these questions should be actively discouraged by downvotes (as I frequently do)

Your thoughts?

Answer 1

I think that the sort of people who chronically post NARQ or OT questions don't care about reputation as much as we think, or would hope, that they do. That said, if all this accomplishes is earlier trigger of "Sorry, we're no longer accepting questions from this account", great.

Answer 2

I like the spirit of the suggestion very much, but I would much prefer a silent rep loss for the OP that doesn't show in the voting indicator, maybe even as much as 5 or 10 points for repeat offenders.

I frequently downvote bad questions, and check back a few hours later to see whether anything has changed so I can remove the downvote. I often find that my downvote has been pity upvoted even though the OP has not improved anything at all. The same thing is bound to happen to community downvotes (although admittedly, pity upvotes after a closing occur more rarely.)

The user base should be educated about doing more downvoting on terrible content. Maybe that is an issue that needs separate looking at.

Also, if it's not already happening, some types of closings should be calculated into the "Sorry, we no longer accept questions from this account" algorithm (with the closing counting like one downvote).

Answer 3

no more using up daily downvotes, at a cost of -1 rep, to the users who helped close these questions and genuinely feel these questions should be actively discouraged by downvotes (as I frequently do)

If that's your goal, then consider: five users down-voting and NaRQ voting will result in a closed question with a -5 score. A community vote at the time of closing will boost this a little, but doesn't really sate the urge when voting.

How about setting it up like the spam flags? Each close-vote implies a down-vote (but doesn't cost the caster rep), which evaporates if the question is never closed.

Answer 4

As a mod on Writers.SE I just closed a question that was clearly off-topic. Apparently this was implemented across the SE sites. I fully support it for StackOverflow and other popular sites, but I question the wisdom of having this feature on the beta sites. The beta sites are, in many ways, still figuring out the list of on-topic versus off-topic questions and are trying to grow their user base. When new users show up and ask clearly off-topic questions even if we gently try to close them (if they cannot be edited into something on-topic), this may seem like a much firmer smack than necessary - more like a slap in the face than a tap on the wrist.

Is this feature strictly necessary for the beta sites? I think not. For the rest of the sites I can support it, but not for those still in beta, public or private.

Answer 5

This seems reasonable for Stack Overflow, and perhaps for other launched sites. But please do not do this on beta sites. On a beta site, it's important to have some latitude to try borderline questions, and these should not be punished. People can still manually downvote the egregious cases — it's rare to reach the daily vote limit on a beta site.

Like others have said already, the automatic downvotes should be rescinded if the question is reopened or migrated (even if the migration is triggered later by a moderator).

Another point which I think hasn't been mentioned yet: if a question is migrated, then closed on the target site, there shouldn't be an automatic downvote.

Answer 6

My initial opinion was "no, this isn't a good idea".

However after reading the whole post and understanding the increasing volume of such bad questions I was convinced this is a good idea - mainly as it will automatically block serial OT'ers. As mentioned before, most such people don't really care about reputation.

My additional two cents are to apply the same logic for Answers that get rightly flagged as "Not a real answer" or "Not welcome in our community" - the member posting such answer should get rep penalty and eventually be blocked from posting new answers.

Answer 7

Oddly, I was just considering posting a question arguing for my personal policy: if it's worth voting to close (save for migration), it's worth downvoting. I'd be happy to be proved statistically wrong, but I see little evidence of the pattern of 'close, improve, reopen'. Most of what I'm voting to close is awful, and the OPs do not improve them. Most of the reopens are the results of tug-o-war over bikesheds -- as far as I observe.

So I'm all in favor of this notion, especially as modified by Shog9 to increase the sting.

A further thought. If votes are really supposed to rate the content, not the behavior, then 'increasing the sting' isn't really apropos. The original downvote rates the content. If you want to add a flag-like sting to the user, then something else should be added on top. For new users, going into 'poor question purgatory' is enough. For those repeat offenders with thousands in rep, a few downvotes is hardly a sting at all, and something else is called for.

Answer 8

I've seen many questions closed wrongly. They were written by people with poor English skills, and closed very quickly before there was enough time to edit and fix them. I've also seen questions closed off-topic that weren't, or that just needed clarification to show that they weren't; again, it happens so quick there's no time to fix them.

One possibility is after 24 hours (or so), if the ratio of down to up-votes is at a certain amount, then apply the community downvote. This will give time for people to change their votes after an edit. I don't think this would work unless you gave notification to downvoters of those posts after they've been edited (only in the same delay timeframe). You could just show the edit notification in one of the dropdowns.

Answer 9

I'm in general in favor of this approach, with a few caveats:

For low-rep users, even one point feels significant. (It took me a long time before I cast my first down-vote, because it felt immensely difficult to earn reputation.) So I'd like to suggest the first incident for new-ish users be a notice "Hey, your question was closed as offtopic/NARQ, read http://tinyurl.com/so-hints for more advice on avoiding this. Next time it'll cost a point."

For high-rep users, one point feels insignificant -- a -1 score on a question is often replaced by a pity +1 vote, and a few iterations of a borderline question might generate +18 or +27 rep. (I'd love to know the ratio between pity-voting bringing up rep on borderline questions than decent questions that just never get voted on at all.) So repeat offenses feel like they should scale with the ratio of closed questions and reputation of the poster: -1, -10, -20, -1%, -2%, etc.

Kinder on the kind side and meaner on the mean side.

Answer 10

I believe this should be measured against reputation. If you have less than 100 reputation on the site then you should be immune to the Community downvotes affecting your reputation. In fact, instead of a downvote, perhaps new users should receive an email with a link to the FAQ.

For users over 100 reputation, we can then start applying the automatic downvote for closed questions. Perhaps 100 is too low. This number could be adjusted based on perceptions of when the rules start to click based on reputation. I've definitely seen 3000+ users asking some very poor questions that were worthy of a downvote.

It's also important to point out that downvotes don't just affect offenders. They are signposts that inform the community that a certain behavior is not appreciated or expected. Therefore, since most of the off-topic questions are posted by new users, we would fail to effectively utilize this powerful community tool.

My suggestion is to close off-topic questions, assign them to the Community user, and then assign the downvote. We will spare the new user from the psychological impact of the downvote while still making it clear to the community that the question was not appropriate.

Answer 11

I'd second @jmort's point about handling low-rep users differently, though I think I'd limit the difference to just sending a mail as well as downvoting.

I also wonder whether sympathy upvoting might be a problem? But would adding a comment about 'automatic downvote for x-reason' make things worse?

Answer 12

I think this might be more effective if any existing upvotes are stripped away at the same time Community casts its downvote.

Instant feedback (karma) and all that.