Concept of "conditional" downvotes?

Question

Down-voted questions seem to fall into two categories: fixable and unfixable. Some questions are just inappropriate, easily answerable with minimal search effort, or have other problems for which nothing will make them good questions. Others are, or can be, good and useful questions but were asked poorly. Downvoting is supposed to be an incentive to improve the question.

There is a consequence, though--the downvotes don't go away when the problem is fixed. They served their original purpose. However, now you have a perfectly good question that is stigmatized by the downvotes, discouraging viewers because the downvotes are then misleading. You can also have the situation where people spend time answering the question and before the answer gets any upvotes, the OP deletes the question due to the downvotes. This disincentivizes answering.

It seems like it would be beneficial to have two types of down votes for questions. The new one would be a conditional downvote. It would be available to be cast (voter's option), in instances where the voter's objection would go away if the question's problems were fixed.

There are a number of ways the mechanics could work:

• The voter gets an inbox message that the question was edited. If they are satisfied with the change, they un-downvote.

• There is some type of community review where conditional downvotes can be removed if the problems are deemed fixed (conditional downvotes would be used in those situations where the problem is easily recognized and the voter is OK to let the community decide).

Both approaches would benefit from some delay (maybe 12 hours after the first edit), since improvements to questions are often done in several rounds. These two approaches are not mutually exclusive and there are probably other potential mechanisms.

Answer 1

I like the concept that you're raising, but not the implementation. I feel its a bit counterintuitive to have two types of downvotes - we've already had instances of people using Close votes as a "Super Downvote", we wouldn't want to make it even more confusing.

Instead - we should stick to just having 'downvote', with one of the additional features you mentioned: Being notified when a question you've downvoted has been edited. I feel this will adequately address the main problem- which is downvoters not knowing that the question is improved in order to adjust their vote accordingly.

Answer 2

Everything you said about questions applies equally to answers.  A few days ago I posted a one-line answer (to this question) because I was in a hurry.  By the time I got back to it, 15 hours later, it had accrued two downvotes – as far as I can tell, simply because it was too short (lacked explanation).  I proceed to expand on the answer, so it’s now over 50 lines long.  I engaged in several rounds of comments with the OP, who eventually accepted the answer.  But the downvotes remain, (presumably) because the downvoters never realized that I had updated the answer.

Since my initial answer was correct, but just code-without-explanation, I would hope that people would have used conditional downvotes if they had been available.

Answer 3

I like your idea, but I would build out the process as follows:

• Add a new downvote mechanic with a shaded arrow called conditional downvote with the hover text of this question can be improved to be more acceptable on this site. Conditional downvotes subtract 0.5 votes from the vote score of the question, and do not affect anyone's reputation. Fractional votes are not displayed and are always rounded up towards the positive, so if you have +2 upvotes, -1 regular downvote and -3 conditional downvotes, the score would show 0, because (+2-1-(3/2)) ==> -0.5 ==> rounds up to 0.
• Add a new review queue for questions needing improvement. Any question that receives more than one conditional downvote from a user with 10k rep or higher gets added to the list of questions needing improvement, regardless of that question's total score. If <10k rep users cast conditional downvotes, a total of five votes (any mix of zero or one 10k vote and 4 or 5 non-10k users) are needed to add it to the questions needing improvement queue.
• An accepted edit for a question needing improvement gives the editor +2 reputation, regardless of what their reputation is, or how many edits they've made. If the user is high enough rep that they can unilaterally make edits without going through the suggested edit queue, they can receive a maximum of +2 rep per question (even if they make a series of good edits on the same question), and if their edit is rolled back, the rep gain is reversed.
• Add another new review queue for improved questions. Any question that was formerly on the questions needing improvement queue that has an accepted edit applied to it, is removed from the questions needing improvement queue and added to the improved questions queue.
• Reviewers who look at questions in the improved questions queue will see the revision history of the question as well as the latest revision. They may upvote, downvote, or edit the question. If two separate users (regardless of rep) upvote or click a button stating "The edited question is of good quality", all conditional downvotes that were applied to the question are reversed, and the option for conditionally downvoting the question is removed, permanently, unless the question has (or later gets) a negative score after the conditional downvotes are removed, in which case the option remains for another go-round in the questions needing improvement queue.
• The other options for reviewers in the improved questions queue include: skip, which just goes to the next entry in the queue; and I'm done, which will apply any vote or edit changes made by the user but will not remove the question from the improved question queue unless the reviewer upvoted the question.
• 10k users and diamond moderators have no restriction on the number of conditional downvotes they can cast per day.
• <10k users who are not diamond moderators can cast 50 conditional downvotes per day.
• New badges for the new queues and specifically for editing questions that are in need of improvement.
• A notification is added to the StackExchange notifications inbox of any user who has cast a conditional downvote, whenever the question makes it through the improved questions list and has its conditional downvotes removed. This gives the user the opportunity to revisit the question and determine whether it needs more editing, a straight-up downvote, an upvote, or a vote to close.

This is a good suggestion, btw, but I doubt SE will implement it because it adds significant complexity to a system that's already reasonably complex with several existing review queues, votes to close and delete questions, the "on hold" mechanic, etc.

Also, this question might best be migrated to meta.stackexchange.com to get the entire community's feedback, not just SU -- because even if they were to implement this, it would certainly be network-wide.

Answer 4

Generally, questions that receive a lot of downvotes will likely be closed pending review. If the question is reopened, then I think the votes (up and down) should be erased and let the cycle start again.