# Tag Info

## Hot answers tagged votes

31

Let's look at the data. First up is a plot of acceptance rates versus the number of answers, with a weighted GAM smooth superimposed (courtesy ggplot2). It shows $11,609$ users. The strongest signal is a strong "learning effect" for those with $25$ or fewer answers. (There are many possible explanations: it's not necessarily due to learning to write high-...

27

When a person in 2017 is looking at an answer that may have been written in 2010 (say), it's not that person's responsibility to try to figure out if the answer might have been correct at some time many years previously. Either the answer is correct right now or it isn't. The correct actions when faced with an incorrect answer are already laid out by ...

26

TL;DR Vote early and often. Deploy your daily votes constructively to help people use our site effectively and well. I'm sure people have different systems for reading posts and voting on them. Please bear in mind the constructive role played by voting, which I think is the concern being expressed here: Upvotes, when they are merited, encourage people to ...

26

In short: I think that the bottom-line is that in terms of correlations, there is not a clear effect. It differs per user, and if we would scale the number of equations by the size of the post then actually the post scores become lower for more equations. To see if there are causal effects one might still do some alternative experiments, but the ...

24

As far, as I can verify, it was me who made the upvote. Out of fun and out of curiosity. I also thought it was inconsequential since the answer will get flagged and removed soon and since I would remove the upvote few minutes later anyway. I didn't care that the answer was just posted, nor did I know that there is a badge for upvotes. I can't answer the ...

24

I'm all in favor of option 3: ask SE to lower the threshold for closing questions from 5 to 3 votes. (Importantly, the same should apply to the threshold for reopening a question. This is also the case at SO.) In addition, at SO, qualified users of 3000 rep minimum can cast up to 50 close or reopen votes per day. Here, we only get 24 close (and presumably ...

20

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 ...

20

I can answer this from the perspective of someone who has given clumps of up-votes to users at various points in time, often for old obscure answers. As Tim correctly points out in his answer, this generally starts off either when a profile piques my interest through a good question or answer in the main thread, or simply from browsing through profiles on ...

19

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. ...

19

My best guess: someone found your answer that s/he liked, up-voted it, clicked your profile and found other answers s/he liked. There is no algorithm that bounces questions in clusters. What is bounced on the main site is the questions with no accepted answer and the ones that were edited (either question or answer).

18

CV's a democracy of a kind, so many standard political points arise. The first lessons in politics include learning that many other people are very confident in telling you should be voting this way or you shouldn't be voting that way. Excuse me: they're my votes, or not. Within the rules, I vote as I like. (I don't impute or infer attempts to offend, ...

18

I'll frame this more widely in these terms: people here may readily disagree with (a) someone else's upvote or (b) the OP's acceptance of an answer. Clearing (b) out of the way: An OP's acceptance of an answer is their exercise of their privilege. In principle, they are free to accept an answer they find helpful and need pay absolutely no attention to the ...

18

Votes on this site are highly noisy and so over-analyzing one-offs like this is a waste of energy in my opinion (especially because the criteria for what deserves an up/downvote are completely individual specific). I don't hear you complaining about upvotes on ancient posts that may or may not still be relevant. Just from my own posts, I can see that ...

18

Some users on this site feel compelled to provide input on things they don't understand and this sounds like a more nuanced version of that...Obviously you can vote however you want but, since you asked... If you are sincerely unsure about whether or not the answer is correct, I don't know why you'd upvote it: that adds noise to the system and could mislead ...

18

To clarify: programming questions are not automatically off-topic here. Instead, they are off-topic if they don't need "statistical expertise to understand or answer"; as we see under Programming in the help/on-topic: if it needs statistical expertise to understand or answer, ask it here I am not criticizing or challenging your response to programming ...

15

For reasons I hope are obvious, (1) these "simple checks, heuristics or algorithms" are in place and (2) their details--even their nature--are not publicized. When you think you have been a victim of "revenge" or "serial" downvoting, please do not post the usual "why the downvote?" comments. Instead, flag one of the downvoted posts and use the "Custom" ...

15

I'd agree that there is at best a weak positive correlation. But what is effort? It's not just the effort that went into an individual answer. The effort of following the forum over a few years needs to enter the accounting. So effort is obvious short-term effort $+$ whatever long-term effort is pertinent. Over time on the forum, you learn at least ...

15

I think there are several (confounding) factors here. The biggest, by far, is the number of views a thread gets. If no one views a given thread, there are obviously no opportunities for people to vote. Moreover, every view isn't necessarily another actual opportunity for people to vote anyway; many of the views may come from the same people (who may have ...

15

Voting is an important signal, but for many askers only acts as a signal at all when given before they get an answer they like (because they then don't log in until they have another question). If a user asks a good question, there's no loss in upvoting it immediately. Why wait? If a user asks a badly formed/somewhat mangled question, there's some argument ...

14

As well as, or instead of, taking any of the actions @NickCox has discussed, we can flag or vote to close the common questions as duplicates (preferably soon after they're asked), thus ensuring they're linked to a good answer.

14

After actively observing CV for some time I'd say that the recipe for a question to get noticed and highly upvoted is: Make it general rather then narrow, Use a short, meaningful, but "catchy" title, Make it nicely formatted, use code formatting and $\TeX$, It should consist of a few sentences and should not be one sentence: an overly long question would ...

14

Include any XKCD drawing.

13

See this blog post I wrote for the CV site, Voting behavior and accumulation of old votes on CV (I know I need to work on my titles). As of 2012, there was non-trivial accumulation of upvotes for older questions, they are somewhat invisible to regular interaction though. Here I have updated the query to return the aggregate counts of Vote Day - Post Day. ...

13

We have a boilerplate close reason for such questions: Self-study questions (including textbook exercises, old exam papers, and homework) that seek to understand the concepts are welcome, but those that demand a solution need to indicate clearly at what step help or advice are needed. For help writing a good self-study question, please visit the meta ...

13

1. To what extent is this a common experience of new answerers? Do we lose noticeable number of potentially active participants this way? I think I felt similarly when I started participating, and it was years before I became a regular user. As with most communities, this one has some unusual norms that take a while to learn - especially since there's no ...

12

Some personal thoughts/methods about this important issue: voting. 1- Voting on answers: In this thread, Peter Flom gives an answer about the low answer ratio that was found/audited in CV (at that time): "...I think that is partially a function of the nature of statistics and the questions we get..." Many users agreed with him and I believe this ...

12

The first clustering algorithm you will learn about is k-means. That is nice and good, but unfortunately people will sometimes think that k-means is the One Tool to solve all their clustering problems and neglect finding out about drawbacks and alternatives to k-means. In such cases, I find both Anony-Mousse's and David Robinson's answers to the question ...

12

I agree that this is common. I don't find it especially troubling on the whole. If a question is unacceptable on any ground, it doesn't belong. If you throw something out, it is secondary why you do. At the same time, good (concise, precise, informative) feedback will tell the OP what was wrong (and help them to do it less often in the future). In ...

12

Do not agree with the position that very early voting is unjustifiable. It can be a reasonable voting pattern. In many cases some questions show genuine research effort and/or tackle an very interesting problem. Heck, some of them I am curious about myself! I will obviously upvote that as soon as I finish reading it and understand the basic issue. If that ...

12

I'm sorry for any new user who has been discouraged in genuine attempts to ask a question. I agree there's a problem with what appears to be an amount of fairly indiscriminate downvoting. If you're posting the best question you can - and try to act on any feedback you do get - I'd encourage you to avoid deleting your questions (at least if they only get a ...

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