Negative up-vote/down-vote ratio: is it effective mentoring, or too harsh?

Question

Voting on the questions and answers within the Super User community has often been a lively topic of discussion. Our voting tendencies are deemed important enough that during past Super User moderator elections, scripts were created to help focus attention on the up-vote/down-vote ratio as one of the more vital statistics that could aid us in evaluating the candidates.

Our Super User Help Center explains voting in the following manner:

Voting is central to our model of providing quality questions and answers; it is how …

• ...good content rises to the top
• ...incorrect content falls to the bottom
• ...users who consistently provide useful content accrue reputation and are granted more privileges on the site

It’s only through voting that a class of editors, closers, and moderators can emerge to help run and govern the site. Voting is how site leadership forms.

Taking it a step further, the Help Center guidance for up-votes says the following:

When should I vote up?

Whenever you encounter a question, answer or comment that you feel is especially useful, vote it up!

Conversely, the the Help Center advice regarding down-votes says the following:

When should I vote down?

Use your downvotes whenever you encounter an egregiously sloppy, no-effort-expended post, or an answer that is clearly and perhaps dangerously incorrect.

As we know, the up-vote privilege (available when the community member accumulates 15 reputation) is granted much sooner than the down-vote privilege (granted when the member has acquired 125 reputation). Notably, the Help Center emphasizes the following important point:

What are the alternatives to down-voting?

The up-vote privilege comes first because that's what you should focus on: pushing great content to the top. Down-voting should be reserved for extreme cases. It's not meant as a substitute for communication and editing.

Instead of voting down:

• If the post is spammy or offensive, flag it.
• If the question is duplicate or off-topic, flag it for moderator attention.
• If something is wrong, please leave a comment or edit the post to correct it.

Overall, we can see that the proper usage of both up-votes and down-votes can be beneficial within the Super User realm. However, with all of the aforementioned Help Center guidance at the forefront of our minds, the following question arises:

What is the consensus opinion regarding community members who have amassed a negative up-vote/down-vote ratio during their Super User career: does that represent someone who is effectively mentoring the authors, or have they habitually become too harsh and critical?

Answer 1

Downvotes on their own are terrible mentoring. They lack context on their own for a new user, and much like puppies, some other input is needed.

While comments are transient, in many cases pairing them with downvotes (or adding downvotes after a comment) may be efficient. I try to use positive reinforcement here and often comment rather than downvote, though sometimes you need extra emphasis.

That said, the 'visible vote counts' do not show the whole story.

I have over 5400 closevotes and roughly 9000+ deletions. Many of these questions would have been downvoted if I hadn't had the high reputation user/moderator powers I have.

For example - more than one person would have downvoted properly terrible posts before deletion became an option. Downvotes on deleted posts don't seem to be listed on your methodology. Even assuming these questions were so bad they deserved the downvotes, this would skew the numbers.

And well. We use the tools we have. Not everyone takes well to being mentored by comments. Some people just want answers. In many cases, looking at a post, the payoff for mentoring dosen't feel good enough. I'm fine with polishing up posts - either directly or via comments. Sometimes though (and I'm not naming names linking posts here) - the effort just doesn't seem worth it.

There's a bunch of link only answers (which the auto review queue comments should in theory handle) I come across. There's sometimes blatantly harmful answers (which I nuke) and incorrect ones (which I comment on and downvote).

This assumes, of course, that downvotes are mainly against new users. I've occationally had to remind high reputation users of basic things, (and there, I shouldn't have to be mentoring them). People sometimes have off days. Etc Etc.

So, without context, the numbers mean less than one would assume. I do agree that we can do a better job, but we always have room to improve.

Answer 2

Executive summary: commenting to explain downvotes is a very good thing to do. Doing that consistently is far more important than shooting for any up/downvote ratio. Fortunately, we also have plenty more upvotes going around than downvotes.

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There's been some confusion regarding the statistics used in the question and its answers, so I'll take a moment to clear those up. In the bottom right of the "summary" subtab of a user's Activity tab, there is a Votes Cast section. Those counts do include votes on deleted posts; relevant MSE. On your own "votes" subtab, you don't see up/downvotes on deleted posts. (You can see closure and deletion votes on now-deleted posts.) The Data Explorer's UpVotes and DownVotes columns in the Users table are the same as the Votes Cast section. I'm not sure that there's a right way or wrong way to measure voting using these figures, but we should be clear about what we're counting.

Voting statistics are inherently difficult to measure because of the necessary anonymity on who cast what, but let's look at some SEDE numbers just for fun. I made this query to show some info on the most active voters. It includes the 50 users with the most votes who have been seen in the last month. The UpPerDown column is the user's upvotes divided by the number of downvotes. It's not possible to get "negative" ratios here, since one cannot cast a negative number of votes. To get some visible symmetry between "more downvotes" and "more upvotes," the PositivityScore column is a logarithm of UpPerDown. For example, someone who upvotes twice as often as they downvote gets a score of ln 2 = about 0.69, while someone who downvotes twice as often as they upvote gets a score of -0.69. Someone who votes up and down equally often gets zero. The CommPerMaybeDv column is my attempt to measure mentoring, but since SEDE doesn't have a lot of info on deleted posts, and because votes are anonymous, there are so many pitfalls here that you shouldn't trust it too much. It's supposed to show the number of comments made by the user on posts they might have downvoted divided by their total downvotes, but again, there's not enough public information to be certain, and deletion continues to skew results. Think of it as an arbitrary mentoring score with a ton of noise.

All data aside, I agree that it's a Good Thing to comment when downvoting. Forcing people to comment when downvoting has been requested many times, but there isn't a good way to make that work. Relevant MSE, one of many.

Voting in both directions is very important, for multiple reasons. Besides rewarding/disciplining post authors, it also signals to future readers what is good and worth reading. A negative score is a much stronger signal in that way than a zero score. Comments with downvotes would help in that department (as warnings of suboptimal practices), but unfortunately, post authors frequently become very upset at commenters that they suspect cast downvotes. Several times, I have been accused of downvoting things I didn't because I tried to help the user. High-rep users who have been around a while and subjected to that a lot could be understandably weary of it.

For what it's worth, there are some very rare cases where commenting is actively undesirable. I once dealt with a user (on a different site) who repeatedly posted non-answers. Each time, I gently reminded him of the site's requirements, but he became increasingly upset. Eventually I realized that he would not listen, and when I removed his last post with no comment (and therefore no notification), he left of his own accord.

The system as it stands allows people to vote as they please, so long as the votes aren't targeted (e.g. revenge downvoting, sockpuppet upvoting). The site is so large that one voter with unusual preferences will on the whole be counteracted by another with the opposite patterns. Even someone who only downvotes but always leaves constructive explanatory comments can be an asset to the site. "Mentoring" has far more to do with consistently commenting on individual encounters than a person's ratio of vote types.

If a user gets downvoted with no explanation, they do have one recourse: this place, meta. Generally, meta questions about specific posts get answered pretty quickly. They have the additional advantage of being far more accessible (and therefore useful to others) than comments under some post somewhere on main. I personally wish the existence and purpose of meta was made more obvious to new users.

You will be happy to know that, in general, there are far more upvotes in play than downvotes. This tiny query tells us that Super User has more than 10 times as many upvotes as downvotes (not counting votes from deleted users or the automatic downvotes on red-flagged posts, but counting votes on deleted posts). This other query counts the votes on non-deleted posts by new-ish users, those with less than 500 reputation. The upvote proportion is even more extreme here: almost 12x as many positive votes as negative ones. Of course, that doesn't include deleted posts, but it's still interesting.

More relevant MSEs:

• Should we have a policy about "too much downvoting"?
• Should I be concerned about my upvote/downvote ratio?
• Am I downvoting too much, or are things really that bad?

Answer 3

This is a personal reflection. I recognize that a substantial part of SU's strength is that we are not all the same. But this is what I think when I see down votes in certain contexts:

My first beef is questions which are not spam with downvotes and no comments. Especially on questions from new users and low score users, this just raises my hackles.

My opinion is that, excepting the very, VERY extreme (and rare) cases of truly bad question asking, those along the lines of "it's broke", or actual spam or unwanted content which really should be flagged and reported instead, down votes should ALWAYS be accompanied by comments.

A comment doesn't take long to write, especially if the question is bad enough to get a down vote but not bad enough to be flagged. Based on the context, the comment can be a sentence of fewer than 100 characters. That's text message length. That's not going to break your fingers or your stopwatch to type out.

If I don't have the time to comment, why am I surfing bad questions?

The biggest reason I dislike drive-by down voting so much is that it turns people off to the site, and thereby deprives us of people, both with questions and knowledge.

I asked stupid questions and did bad jobs putting together even some of my better question in my earlier days here. I received deserved criticism, and thankfully much of it was constructive. I'm glad I stuck around.

The drive-by down vote just says "We don't want you here", and that is one of the worst things we can say to almost everyone who comes here.

Yes, we want them to help themselves as much as possible. We want a little bit of effort, a few searches, a reasonably thorough description of the problem and its context. But we also want them. We want them to grow from bottom-level askers who need to know how to ask a good question almost more than they need a solution to their problem, because a good question and the process of developing it can often lead to the actual solution, no question actually asked. But we also want them to appreciate and trust SU as a source of good advice, which means correct advice well given.

They won't get there if we've just slammed the door in their faces the first time they show up.

Answer 4

Before drawing any conclusions, I thought it was best to compile some data pertaining to Super User voting trends.

I decided that one good method would be to examine the tendencies of our most active community members. Essentially, their proactive nature helps them (along with our moderators) serve as the public face of the Super User community. I wanted something that would be relatively comprehensive, and as a result I scrutinized the voting careers of the top 50 people in the Super User reputation league standings for calendar year 2016. The resulting data was fascinating:

• The average level of Super User experience among the 50 people on the list was 5.1 years
• 43 out of the 50 people on the list (86%) had a positive up-vote/down-vote ratio
• All five Super User moderators who made the list had a positive up-vote/down-vote ratio
• The cumulative voting efforts of all 50 people resulted 116,497 up-votes and 75,346 down-votes, which is approximately a 1.5-to-1 positive ratio.
• If you remove the two people at the extreme far end of the scale (the one who cast the most up-votes along with the person who cast the most down-votes) from each side, the cumulative votes from the remaining 48 people revealed approximately a 2.3-to-1 positive ratio.
• The median up-vote/down-vote ratio on the list was a 6-to-1 positive ratio.

From my perspective, everyone on that "top 50" list should be commended for the tremendous amount of time and effort they have devoted towards the Super User community. The statistics I cited seem to support the conclusion that as a whole, the group seems to personify the Super User community goals and principles.

On the other hand, there are a small number of people on the list who have compiled approximately twice as many down-votes as up-votes, and some are actually much more strict than that. I'm sure that their actions were taken with the best of intentions, but yes, I think that the end result of their efforts is a bit too harsh. Having a critical eye for the greater good of the Super User community is certainly beneficial, but if we become so focused on that aspect of voting that we rarely think to reward notable efforts with an up-vote, it's probably a disservice to the people who did author effective questions and answers. It can potentially discourage new and talented Super User community members from contributing even more in the future.

Once again, that passage from the Help Center stands out:

The up-vote privilege comes first because that's what you should focus on: pushing great content to the top. Down-voting should be reserved for extreme cases. It's not meant as a substitute for communication and editing.

Answer 5

Off all the Stack Exchange sites, SuperUser is by far the most aggressive in terms of downvoting and overzealous moderation. You are not even given a chance to explain that their opinion was wrong, extremely heavy handed. And I don't see it increasing the quality, on the contrary it became an effective barrier to entry, and I know for a fact that I am not the only one to think or experience this. Community moderation is like citizen journalism, faulty and opinionated, and SuperUser brought this to perfection. Maybe you should look up to SO instead. But no, you moderators are going to debate here whether -2 points are educational, not realizing you are the root cause of the problem.