How can we discourage downvoting when inappropriate?

Question

Note the approximately equal opinions +16/-13 on this question. Clearly, this question divides our site members into approximately equal groups of opinions for downvoting. To those who would prefer a different tenor for the text of the question, please note that democracy is supposed to bring up issues worth discussing, which is not the same as having everyone agree about everything. Surely there are users who do not feel that downvoting is broken. Those users surely would not object to tweaking downvoting with clearly better alternatives to better serve those of us who do feel it is broken.

It has been my experience on multiple answers and even on closure votes on questions that unreasonable downvoting occurs like a flock of geese landing on a pond, more of a follow-the-leader activity, as contrasted to independent, original, individual thought.

Sometimes, on our site, this crowd behavior occurs because of a word that means one thing to a statistician and something else to many other specialists. Sometimes this occurs because a minor error is committed, and even when it is corrected, the downvotes remain.

When something that is just too original a thought is being developed, and the readers are guiding the development of that thought, progress is being made. This is usually downvoted, it generates interest, draws readers to that question, and usually rewards some other answer of a more conventional, boring, and incomplete type that "fits" within the scope of the average reader's training.

This is hardly the first time this phenomenon has been noted (e.g.: see here and here).

What can we do to discourage the bandwagon effect in CV SE?

• Should we limit the number of downvotes to one per day until the user reputation is greater than 1000?
• Should we increase the +125 reputation needed for first downvoting?
• Should we add a decision tree for downvoting like we have for flagging or close voting?
• Should we modify close voting to shift some down votes to close votes?

Your thoughts, as usual are welcome. Here is another example, view it soon as these things change when attention is called to them.

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Edit:

Can we do something about this problem to make downvoting more useful?

Here are some new suggestions:

• We might require commenting for downvoting but include the option for making that comment anonymous. The motive for this would be to prevent the fear of retaliation to the downvoter, while enabling the downvoter to contribute.
• We might allow the downvoter to be notified when the answer is changed, so that the downvoter has the option of regaining his(her) +2 when the perceived problem (real problems or or even a misunderstanding of the downvoter) has been addressed by changing the content of the post.

In the final analysis, downvoting fulfills a role, the question here is whether we can improve that role for everyone's sake.

Here is another example of downvoting that makes no sense, that is off topic and is reminiscent of bower-birds collecting shiny objects as part of their mating ritual.

Yet another example of nasty negative reactions. The users spent all of their time and reputation points criticizing both the question, which is now on hold, and which was naive but not ridiculous. Lots of comments on how ridiculous the question is, but no downvotes. There was even a comment about the comments that no one bothered to answer the question. Enter moi into this regurgitation of furballs, and whatever I wrote got more downvotes. Meritorious? @gung didn't think so. What is a new user to think of this nonsense? The only person who bothered to try to help rather than spew negativity got clobbered for his efforts.

EDIT on 2018-10-21 Yet another suggestion, bear with me on this. Let's make a point with some quick and dirty pseudo-science...

The graph on the left is from users with mostly very high reputations. It shows two fairly obvious clusters. The left-hand group has a wider range of percentages of question votes versus total votes, and a low percentage (<9%) of downvotes. Let's call this group 'softies.' The right hand group in this left sided figure are the 'tough-guys' they tend to downvote much more frequently (>18%). Without being totally scientific about it, the fact that there is a clear distinction between these groups (with no values between 9% and 18%) suggests to us that we users, even the highest reputation rollers we have, have inconsistent approaches to downvoting. Next, let us look search for why this is. The figure to the right shows a crude 'information content' analysis. Don't fret, I am not trying for plu-perfect stats here. It shows that there is a significant correlation between log-downvotes per reputation point and log-percentage downvotes. Sure, this correlation is not very explanatory, but note that the clustering has disappeared. I think, and do correct me if I am wrong, that this suggests that those who more readily express negative information content (opinions) do so as a relatively increased percentage of their opinions.

Now, what does this mean? For one thing, from the viewpoint of recipients of these votes, inconsistent, i.e., erratic, downvoting is problematic. That is, it more depends on who is reviewing what than what is being reviewed. If you get a softie rather than a tough-guy as a first voter, you are in luck.

Finally, the new suggestion. We could make participation badges for kind-hearted behaviour. For example, less than 10% downvotes for 400 votes (bronze), 1000 votes (silver) and 4,000 votes (gold). This might give users a motive for not being hypercritical and help balance out the perception of arbitrarily hypercritical reactions to posts. I noted unscientifically while doing this 'pseudo-analysis' that the user self-descriptions that were the most 'in your face' belonged to the most negative reviewers, and that the emotionally mature reviewers and those who said squat about themselves, tended to be kind-hearted. Some useful advice: If you have to take an oral examination, and you have a choice between having a new, unsure of themselves, assistant professor and an aging professor who has 'seen it all' examine you, take the old fart, you are more likely to be treated fairly.

Edit 2018-11-01 Just to be clear, I am trying to be helpful. There are problems with downvoting and I am trying to be helpful. Example, this post of mine was finally deleted: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/316262/can-we-figure-out-a-way-to-pay-moderators. That occurred following -20 votes from what appear to be accolades of the status quo. Next, is an example of unexplained downvoting for a reasonable question. The answer to that question appears to be that current notation is elliptical enough that a "+" sign between random variables does not indicate whether those are paired outcomes or single outcomes, i.e., whether in the first case, convolution is invoked or in the second case, single outcomes, arithmetic addition is invoked. Regardless, the question continues to receive downvotes (now +16/-5). Would someone care to explain what the root of the -5 votes can be attributed to? (BTW, this is a Famous Question, i.e., 10,000+ visits. But, I finally managed to figure out why someone might down vote it; the question language was informal. I then posited the question more exactly, (only) one downvote disappeared, and several up votes were added in a sort time. So it can matter how one asks a question more than what the question actually is.)

What is occurring in society at large, e.g., political correctness amounting to slander and politically motivated violence, has an effect on our site. For example, this has impacted our site with the institution of politically correct (PC) commenting lest someone be offended, which PC answers are generally twice as long as the more curt versions. Weaponized downvoting is currently poorly controlled, and may become increasingly problematic with time. In searching my own behaviour, I cannot see an altruistic motive for downvoting; something else negative always predominates whether that be strategic downvoting on competitive and incorrect answers, or whatever.

I for one am swearing off of downvoting, take that pledge with me.

Answer 1

I have only a little to add to @NickCox's answer.

Down-votes do tend to be sticky, which is a pity when the down-voted poster makes the effort to improve their post. I don't see any reason to suppose this is due to anything more than people's disinclination to keep on returning to a post they've down-voted to see whether it's been improved. There are some feature requests on Meta SE that you might be interested in:

• Allow an edit to notify downvoters: “I think I've fixed the issue now - please check”

• Allow me to get notifications on specific down-voted questions

• Option to be notified when a post I downvoted is edited

I'd like to see something of the sort implemented. On the other hand I have the impression that for "controversial" posts with several down-votes & several up-votes it's often the case that the up-votes came after an improvement, & after the down-votes—that people are trying to rectify a now-undeservedly low score.

Answer 2

EDIT: Here is a summary added also in reaction to various comments (some now deleted).

Downvoting is not constructive (and not intended to be). It should, mostly, express a view that a post is not useful, although whatever other reasons or motives people may hide remain indiscernible. Downvoting is not informative unless people explain why they downvote. Downvoting is part of the SE system and anyone is free to dislike it, not to use it, to use it very sparingly, or to express opinions on it, or on how it is used. How downvoting is used on CV is clearly germane for this Meta, but trying to argue against or change the system is a SE-wide matter. I don't see evidence that downvoting is out of control here on CV. I see plenty of evidence that some individuals get very upset at being downvoted, and I have some sympathy with that personally, but it is, given human nature, an inevitable side-effect of SE.

I'd be worried about "trolling", "ganging up", "mob behaviour" and "unreasonable downvoting" if ever I saw evidence of them, but I don't think we need any new mechanisms for dealing with bad practices.

I find it disconcerting that some in this thread are so ready to infer people's state of mind, personally or collectively, from the fact of downvoting. Occasionally people do leave angry or nasty comments when they downvote. Then their attitude is plain, but that is out of order and should be handled by reminding people of the need for civility and by flagging bad cases for moderator attention. (Naturally, there is scope for disagreement about precisely what is angry or nasty. I think of myself as often candid but not nasty on purpose; who does?)

But often people do not add comments. When that happens, why they're downvoting is no more than a matter for surmise.

I can tell you my typical state of mind when I downvote a question or an answer after someone else has. It's that I agree with the previous downvoting. The question or answer is just wrong, or too poor to be acceptable. And I am not surprised when other people agree in turn. The polite, parsimonious, default assumption about downvoting is that people are exercising their privilege in good faith and with good reason. Only when you see explicit evidence to the contrary is action needed.

Apart from lack of research effort as grounds for downvoting a question, the main reason for downvoting anything is that it is not useful. To me, that certainly includes being unclear; if something is unclear, it can hardly be useful. It's clearly true that downvoting by itself is not constructive, but often when a post is unclear, it will be true that a downvoter will not be in a position to suggest any specific improvements.

That's not to deny that, like almost anybody else, I do get irritated or annoyed to myself at certain posts or even at certain people.

I won't discuss @Carl's detailed proposals here. They seem to range from the serious to the facetious and it's a small imposition on Meta to be expected to work out which is which. (I don't want people to leave their sense of humour behind when they enter Meta, but proposals for change have to be serious to be taken seriously.) The more crucial point, already made by @amoeba, is that new badges or changed limits on anything are system-wide matters and need to be floated on SE meta.

I have looked at some of the threads @Carl linked to and cannot see anything untoward there. Frankly, @Carl, the pattern I see in these and some of your other posts is this:

First, several of your questions are rather long-winded and come from a very individual perspective. You're proud to be a maverick! No problem there, but even statistical experts can find it hard to see what the question is and the comments can be as or more extensive as the answers. The biggest difficulty there is likely to be your frustration at not getting the kind of discussion you want.

Second, you do write vigorously and colourfully, but seem prone to exaggerated language and occasionally snap and snarl a little. Sometimes that is very entertaining; occasionally it is not constructive. A pugnacious style is sometimes a spur: people don't always back off, but give as good as they get.

But I can't see evidence that people are downvoting you unreasonably.

A recent thread was closed and the OP protested, although not in these words, "The question is clear to me. Why is it being closed as unclear?" The point, naturally, is that a question has to be clear to others to be any use or interest.

In a forum, people will disagree and can and should express their disagreement in various ways. This happens through downvoting, which is not the tool of first preference but exists to be used when appropriate. It's designed by the system and needs to be practised to maintain a healthy archive, weeding out or limiting less fruitful questions.

(I don't like being downvoted either: who does?)

EDIT As at 10 November 2018 the question starts

Note the approximately equal opinions +13/-12 on this question. Clearly, this question divides our site members into approximately equal groups of opinions for downvoting.

This comment on the current Meta thread reflects the entire issue under discussion.

No; it doesn't show anything except that up and downvotes for the question are about equal. My answer pushes what I see as a key negative principle: Unless people explain a downvote, you can't reliably infer what lies behind it. And people aren't always candid even then. (In the case of one person no longer active and an answer of mine, they gave generally positive comments but then promptly downvoted it. I could tell this because there were no other downvotes and that person received a badge for their first downvote on the same day. This was a person who often ranted against being downvoted without explanation, but themselves gave many more downvotes than were ever explained. But that's rare.)

In this case, I can readily imagine all sorts of different reasons for up and down votes.

• Bang on!

• We should be discussing this, even if there really isn't a problem.

• I found this provocative.

• I found this entertaining.

• There isn't a problem.

• There may be a problem, but this doesn't help.

• I don't like the style of this.

• I don't agree with the specific proposals here.

And so on. All those reasons are pure speculation (but to my mind can't be ruled out either, given various answers, comments, etc. and what is evident generally from members' attitudes and behaviour).

Then again, @Carl writes

Surely there are users who do not feel that downvoting is broken. Those users surely would not object to tweaking downvoting to better serve those of us who do feel it is broken.

No "surely" about the second even granting the first, so far as I am concerned. (Surely those in favour of peace wouldn't mind a small war, given those who want one? Surely those in favour of letting people decide what they do on X wouldn't mind banning this and that aspects of X given people who disagree?)

If downvoting is not broken, there is no reason to fix it or even tweak it. In total abstraction, I can readily agree that some downvotes are not deserved, or given for reasons that aren't admirable, or given for the wrong reasons, but who is to say which they are? Almost all I know about are my own downvotes.

This thread is saved from ill-will and rancour because @Carl comes over as a well meaning and thoughtful person, perhaps despite his colourful and combative style, but we have to agree that there is evidence of inappropriate behaviour before we can decide what best to do about it.

Answer 3

I for one am swearing off of downvoting, take that pledge with me.

Just for the record: I have (long time ago) downvoted this question, two (!) of your answers, Alecos's answer, and the answer by SmallChess. I have upvoted Scortchi's and Nick's answers, and have now also upvoted your most recent answer for its nice figures.

Many other people have voted similarly and this is why we have two excellent answers appearing on the top of this page while less satisfactory answers appear below and some of them are even grayed out in the very bottom.

Thanks, StackExchange, for providing such a reasonable mechanism. Personally, I am certainly not going to stop downvoting.

Answer 4

Some research to examine downvoting was performed. The top 500 CV users with respect to reputation were examined with respect to clusters of downvotes using visual inspection then k-means for two populations performed with Mathematica v. 13.0.0.

This shows three clusters. Note that reciprocal scaling was used on the $y$-axis to produce a dependent variable distribution that was indistinguishable from a uniform distribution. Also, square root transformation of the $x$-axis data removed much of the heavy right-tailed appearance. Visual inspection was used to identify the zero percentage downvoter population as cluster analysis proved problematic for that purpose. Subsequently, k-means did a good job of isolating two populations that were relatively independent of reputation level.

Addendum Given the copious feedback, I did further processing. @NickCox suggested using folded square root of percentage downvotes, $\sqrt{x}-\sqrt{100-x}$, on the $x$-axis. This worked well in SPSS in version 13, (old but good), using two-step cluster analysis followed by k-means for a variable number of clusters with the best clustering chosen by BIC. This show the following plot. Two-step cluster analysis showed that classification by reciprocal reputation failed $t$-testing. The cluster data forwarded to k-means then yielded two clusters as below.

This has similar cluster results to those achieved prior. Once again the visually identified clustering at 0% downvoting is obvious, but in this case was selected post hoc. The percentage breakdown is

@NickCox suggests that downvoting is a method of removing low quality posts. Therein is a big hint as to what is going on. What's in a downvote? On a social media site based not on evidence but personal taste, voting is like/dislike. On an evidence based site, more like ours, a vote should, to my way of thinking at least, more plausibly suggest correct/incorrect material. What appears to me to be lacking, and needed on our site is some method of indicating material that is contributory/non-contributory to the site. For example, suppose a question is Why does $2+2=4$?. Obviously, this is not on the correct/incorrect axis but it appears to add little to the site's compendium of knowledge; it is non-contributory. Thus, currently downvoting is a mixture of two axes "like/dislike" and "correct/incorrect". That, I think, is what allowed k-means to identify the split in population at circa 12% downvoting rate. Is there any evidence to support this? The SPSS histogram resulting from the three clusters, one of them identified visually at 0% is...

Next, we ask if the non-0% clusters follow some recognizable distribution type. Mathematica's FindDistribution routine was applied to this data and it selected two Weibull (squared) distributions as the most likely fits from its extensive library of distributions. That is shown next.

Weibull distributions also best fit the original downvote data without square rooting. No matter how I tried to fit the histogram data, the results were not significantly different from Weibull distributions. In absolute terms, this cannot be a Weibull distribution as such a distribution has values beyond 100% downvoting. However, the Weibull result may be relevant as one interpretation of the Weibull distribution relates to diffusion of innovation. As per Weibull "In the context of diffusion of innovations, the Weibull distribution is a "pure" imitation/rejection model...In the context of the diffusion of innovations, this [Sic, $\alpha>1$ (As it is herein), where $\alpha$ is the Weibull shape parameter] means positive word of mouth: the hazard function is a monotonically increasing function of the proportion of adopters. The function is first convex, then concave with an inflexion point at $1-e^{-1/\alpha}$ [Sic, notation translated]"

Thus, there is statistical evidence for two groups of adopters beyond the 0% group, who are "non-adopters". This is evidence for an admixture of downvoting strategies that does not agree with the opinion as voiced in some comments that such a phenomenon does not exist in this data. Such an admixture of voting patterns for downvoting is opaque to the recipient of such votes. That is, although we can sort this out statistically, the individual downvote recipient has no such clues, which implies that downvoting is not efficient and not clean from the user's POV. One remedy for this could be to shunt some of this downvoting in the high downvoting rate category to a closure vote on the contributory/non-contributory opinion axis as this would provide clarity as to what a downvote means for the user while doing a more direct job of addressing material that is non-contributory for the more expert reviewer, as follows.

The selections off topic, too broad and primarily opinion based are currently being used as alternatives for not-contributory. Those alternatives, even taken together, do not span not-contributory such that current practice is not really addressing the need to prune the site for content that is just not up to par value for expert opinion; low quality, not expert question and so forth.

For answers, there is no closure voting per se. However, there is flagging which provides similar functionality, but requires review at my reputation level.

I will continue editing and collating to de-bulk and organize a bit better.

Answer 5

I was one of those @Carl mentions. When I see a downvoted answer, I assume it is a stupid answer. I downvoted @Carl's answer on simple linear regression in machine learning before I even read it. I did that simply because I saw -2 to his answer.

Answer 6

In the answer of user @scortchi we read

Down-votes do tend to be sticky, which is a pity when the down-voted poster makes the effort to improve their post. I don't see any reason to suppose this is due to anything more than people's disinclination to keep on returning to a post they've down-voted to see whether it's been improved.

This is exactly how we treat a crime: we punish the wrong-doer for the crime (bad post) and we also hope that punishment will contribute to better future behavior (future posts). In the factual world this may be realistic since in most cases an action that has exceeded the threshold for a crime cannot be altered/undone. But SE questions can - and by not following up on our downvotes, rewarding by removal of the downvote those posts that were improved, we forego the opportunity to beneficially exploit this additional flexibility.

When individuals (users) use rights & granted powers (downoting) in such an incomplete way, and there is no prospect for a change-of-mentality on the horizon, usually the only solution in sight is to have community representatives take up the duty to clean up (this is a large part of what public sectors are tasked with doing across the globe). In our case, our public sector is the moderators, and it would mean moderators being able and tasked with monitoring downvoted posts and removing downvotes from those that were improved.

Answer 7

Several points made here. Currently, there is little oversight for downvoting, perhaps this is not as constructive as it could be. For example,

(1) We routinely cast closure votes based upon criteria, and closures can be reversed. If we were to institute something along those lines for downvoting, the quality of downvoting might approach that of question closure, but might have to be individualized for each downvoter. Therein, the down-voter would choose an approved reason for down-voting. Then, we could thus have a review cue for edited Q/A for down-vote reversal by a third party or parties. For example, this could be required for users with less that 500 reputation, so as to train users to down vote appropriately. With or without a reputation threshold for review, this may offer some remedy for 'sticky' down votes, and oversight for 'strategic' down voting, e.g., down voting someone else's answer for spite of the 'How dare you compete with my answer?' type, or down voting to vandalize posts as a form of entertainment.

(2) Expert opinion is more needed for down voting for cause than recognition of cause for up voting, for example, currently we can up vote with 15+ reputation and down vote with 125+ reputation. The thinking on this is that it may not be 'enough' of a difference, but at least it is 'something'. (This is human nature, for example, people recognize more concepts (or words) than they are capable of using properly.) I would like to see this 125+ increased if we do not review downvotes. As 200+ is the threshold for being in the leagues, I do not see why someone with so low a reputation as to not be in the leagues should be trusted to issue a down vote that is never reviewed.

(3) There is currently no limit to the percentage of downvotes one can issue. How would the reader feel about a user who never upvotes? Would that be someone who the reader would be comfortable with to review the reader's posts? Perhaps we should consider behaviour limits of some type, for example, not allowing more than 20% down votes. Down vote quota exceeded. You must up vote 4 more Q/A to down vote again.

(4) Downvote avoidance strategies. (a) I note that the use of flippant language, personification, mixed metaphors, and other forms of informal language, even when it is intended to be merely entertaining, or less sterile than formal expression, that it can attract down-votes. (b) I sometimes lose longer posts that are in the process of being edited. Use of the back arrow (above) may be the remedy for this rather than posting incomplete text to obviate incomplete text, non-meritorious, down-voting.

Answer 8

Currently, and do correct me if I am wrong, it costs (-1) to downvote, and the downvote creates a (-2) reputation for the recipient. One alternative is increasing the penalty to the downvoter to at least (-2) to make it more altruistic. Right now, the small penalty encourages trolling (It hurts my target more than me; HaHaHa!), ganging up in a bloodfest as in monkey see monkey do, grudge holding, and other very discouraging behaviors that negatively impact people who are are honestly attemptng to help others. Another alternative for better altruism would be to make it (-1) for the recipient and (-2) for the downvoter.