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I would like to see up/down vote tallies not released until the question has had a chance to be viewed. It's fairly well established that seeing results of votes before you have had a chance to express your opinion (or vote) affects those who view a question later.

How many people don't have a tendency to jump on a bandwagon and follow the along.

Admittedly, comments can have the same effect, but at least there, one can consider why the person commented a particular way: ex: "I don't like your question because I feel anyone who uses Cobol as a programming language deserves all the problems they get..." At least subsequent readers may have a clue as to why the commenter didn't like the question and can choose to agree, disagree, ignore, or contextualize the opinion based on the writer's stated position.

It also might reduce crowd-oriented opinions which, mob-psychology generally shows a tendency towards extreme and unhealthy responses. (burn her, she's a witch!)...gulp...

To emphasize my comment after Journeyman's comment: where I said:

It may be that allowing the poster to see the count might be reasonable, though they'd have to be reminded that the final count won't be displayed until later and not to bias the results by talking about early returns.

It's only about votes affecting other voters that I'm worried about -- not about the question author seeing the votes.

Now the question is is whether or not they took into consideration the added comment or not.

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  • 2 weeks is a very long time as far as a question goes.
    – Journeyman Geek Mod
    Commented May 11, 2017 at 6:21
  • exactly. They are still tallied, but they don't figure into or bias the subsequent answers. It maybe that 1 week is enough -- but wanted it to be long enough to not affect comments & answers. I'll admit to a bit of conservatism in that regard. It may be that allowing the poster to see the count might be reasonable, though they'd have to be reminded that the final count won't be displayed until later and not to bias the results by talking about early returns.
    – Astara
    Commented May 11, 2017 at 6:31
  • "Votes" are not the purpose of the site, or the question. Both want answers. Votes help the reputation of whomever posted the question, or answer, but they don't make the answers better, or worse.
    – Chindraba
    Commented May 11, 2017 at 6:38
  • That defeats a fundamental design of the site.
    – fixer1234
    Commented May 11, 2017 at 6:52
  • This assumes that people who issue a downvote are doing it because other people issued a downvote, instead of the more obvious reason, the contribution has problems and it should be approved
    – Ramhound
    Commented May 11, 2017 at 14:45
  • I can’t help but wonder how many of the people who downvoted this question did so without reading it. #poetic justice #irony
    – Scott - Слава Україні
    Commented May 12, 2017 at 3:15
  • @Scott None of them
    – Ramhound
    Commented May 12, 2017 at 12:39
  • @Ramhound authoritatively says "None of them.", supporting the correlation between self-ascribed certainty and actual knowledge (in this case,) of voters' internal motivations. Perhaps now you see why I think hiding vote counts from voters would be a good thing. In this case, Ramhound has no doubt as to the reasons people voted a certain way and responded in kind. It wouldn't be atypical for someone in that position to claim that they really were "kidding".
    – Astara
    Commented May 12, 2017 at 18:49
  • @Astara I read your question here, I don't agree with it, I don't see it unreasonable to think people took the 2 minutes to read your question and came to the same conclusion. They don't agree with your suggestion
    – Ramhound
    Commented May 12, 2017 at 18:51
  • I've seen more than one vote count done in under 15 seconds. That indicates a facebook level of thinking.
    – Astara
    Commented May 15, 2017 at 2:21

2 Answers 2

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I don't like the idea of delaying the votes at all. Especially for two weeks! A question is lucky to stay on the first page of questions for two hours. After that time it's only going to be seen, and answered and voted on, by people looking through the questions intentionally. Such searchers are not likely to fall to mob mentality in their voting.

Conversely, the instant feedback to the OP can be useful, especially if it alerts them to a problem with the question that voters didn't feel like taking the time to make known in comments.

It also doesn't make sense to hide the votes for that long, or for any length of time really, when the OP only has to wait 15 minutes before accepting an answer (unless it is a self-answer, which requires 48 hours).

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  • I’m not supporting the OP’s request, but I want to point out that hiding votes from the general population (i.e., potential voters) does not imply hiding them from the author of the post.  (Of course, if the OP comments, “Why am I getting so many downvotes?”, then the feline’s out of the bag.)
    – Scott - Слава Україні
    Commented May 12, 2017 at 3:12
3

I'm a management major. I have no idea what deity I must have annoyed to have the words "management" twice in my degree cert.

And our voting system is what we'd call a "distinctive competitive advantage" in management classes.

It is literally the second thing in the site tour.

enter image description here

And that in a busier site (Don't forget, we share a platform with quite a few sites), two weeks is essentially a lifetime, and you might as well forget about voting at all then.

Lemme give you an example of a site that tries the QA format, without the various levels of quality control we have. There you go

Yeah, I picked the most horrifying example.

I'd note though, this has been suggested many times before - This search on MSE gives you many examples, suggesting stuff from why is it even shown to a few days.

At the end of the day, its what makes stackexchange tick, and removing or hiding post scores takes away a major distinction between the network and other QA sites.

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  • 1
    Yeah, I picked the most horrifying example. - I would put Yahoo Answers, above Quora, on the list of horrifying Q&A websites.
    – Ramhound
    Commented May 11, 2017 at 14:41
  • And I picked what is considered to be one of the worst, if not the worst questions they have
    – Journeyman Geek Mod
    Commented May 11, 2017 at 14:43
  • My hatred of Quora is based on the fact, they claim they are so much more welcoming then StackExchange, but they require you to register to view the answers to their questions. Which I find extremely hilarious, because the trash answers that appear on Quora, are not even worth registering my spam email to view ;-)
    – Ramhound
    Commented May 11, 2017 at 14:53
  • @JourneymanGeek - comparing S.Xchange's answers to an extreme, says little about quality of answers. I could just as easily have a site that requires killing a chicken as a sacrifice and compare it to another w/o such. It seems obvious that such a comparison does little to support current sites' answer quality. A better comparison would be to another system that uses voting to get answers: Example: voting on political candidates and other gov+admin policies. It's considered bad to display votes before the vote is closed.
    – Astara
    Commented May 12, 2017 at 18:58

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