2

I noticed that many, many, MANY bad questions end up with at least one up vote. Case in point, this blatantly off topic (for everyone) question. Who would upvote something that has NOTHING to do with computers?

I've also seen product recommendations upvoted, questions that aren't written in English, and others that are definitely NOT within the scope of the site (i.e. dealing with computers).

Is there anything we can do to stop this phenomenon from happening? Upvoting everything makes upvoting feel worthless, in the end. I know the mods can't see who votes for individual posts, but if we want to keep this as a professional-quality site for good Q&A about computers, we need to stop encouraging bad behaviour.

3
  • If we want to start a witch-hunt, then there's this... In all seriousness though, it was probably upvoted because of some misguided sense that it might have been "funny". Otherwise it could have been a sock account.
    – Mokubai Mod
    Commented Aug 11, 2015 at 7:12
  • In addition to what @Mokubai said, the people with the tenacious and unsung hero badges would like a word with you about people throwing about upvotes...
    – bertieb
    Commented Aug 11, 2015 at 7:21
  • @bertieb I'm mostly talking about questions that get the extra +1 vote. Answers, the community is usually quick to decide themselves.
    – Canadian Luke
    Commented Aug 11, 2015 at 16:43

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
3

How do we prevent the occasional bad upvote?

We don't need to.

That question was fairly quickly closed. At time of closure, I saw that it had only one positive upvote, with however many mod flags and vtcs.

Perhaps - as I speculated in a comment - someone had seen the previous iteration and voted it up for the humour of it being reposted under the correct tag that time around? Or perhaps it was out of sheer bloody-mindedness. Or perhaps there was another shill account (that was going to do a spam response to that bait) with sufficient rep to upvote?

Without meaning to sound condescending, the usual approach of "edit, comment, downvote, flag, vtc, bring it up in Ask a Super User moderator" (delete as appropriate) works just fine :-)

Upvoting isn't worthless, as there is only a limited amount of votes per diem in any case. If someone wants to throw away valuable votes, let them- they'll quickly be drowned out by sensible folks voting the 'right' way.

3
  • 2
    Except when the question is removed they get the vote back
    – Ramhound
    Commented Aug 11, 2015 at 11:53
  • @Ramhound wasn't aware of that, good to know! If the post is removed, the problematic upvote is gone :)
    – bertieb
    Commented Aug 11, 2015 at 11:55
  • I only know because when a question is deleted I often get more then 50 votes daily
    – Ramhound
    Commented Aug 11, 2015 at 12:55

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .