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Possible Duplicate:
Statler and Waldorf badge for explaining downvotes

Could there be a badge to encourage adding constructive criticism on a downvote?

We would have to be careful to follow the Positive Badge Rule but I think it can be done by requiring that the user has a comment with a certain number of upvotes to be associated with a minimum percentage of the posts that the user has down-voted.

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    @ Whomever down-voted, I think we know why you don't like this idea...
    – Ethan Cabiac
    Jun 1, 2011 at 4:02
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    sure do: this is meta and they're cheeky little imps. //wishing I'd gotten there first
    – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten
    Jun 1, 2011 at 4:43
  • In all seriousness, though, I'd be OK with this. Make it a +2 or thereabouts requirement on the comments.
    – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten
    Jun 1, 2011 at 4:44
  • See the answers to - meta.stackexchange.com/questions/135/… for why many people think this is a bad idea.
    – ChrisF Mod
    Jun 1, 2011 at 8:20
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    @Andrew, thanks for the link. I did a search for all the keywords and this didn't come up for some reason. In this case, I agree it is a duplicate, since my proposal is similar to the accepted answer on that question.
    – Ethan Cabiac
    Jun 1, 2011 at 13:03

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My first reaction was "not a good idea, people will just leave rubbish comments", but with the refinement of requiring upvotes on the comment maybe that's ok.

Another doubt is about discouraging the following scenario:

  • Downvote
  • Comment
  • Problem fixed
  • Undownvote
  • Delete comment

Though I'm not sure how much that actually happens - I suspect very little.

Some other unresolved questions:

  • In the scenario above, what if the comment isn't deleted but the downvote is removed: is that still badge-worthy?
  • Is this just for the first downvoter, if they leave a comment, or for the first downvote+commenter? (You don't want everyone duplicating the comment for the badge's sake.)
  • How do you know if the comment is actually related to the downvote? Would it have to be prefixed with "-1"?
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  • In the scenario above, the thing that we don't want to discourage is deleting the comment, correct? So any badge would have to be rewarded even if the comment was deleted. As far as knowing if the comment/down vote are related, I think the commenter and down voter being the same person is sufficient.
    – Ethan Cabiac
    Jun 1, 2011 at 13:00
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    @Ethan, ok, so at some time the same user must have simultaneously had a downvote and a comment on the post. I guess that could work, though I'm not sure whether the devs are up for that kind of finicky time-based badge detection.
    – Benjol
    Jun 1, 2011 at 13:07

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