21 votes

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

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 ...
Journeyman Geek's user avatar
  • 128k
11 votes
Accepted

Why don't up-votes on comments give reputation?

Comments serve an auxiliary function; they exist to support the all-important questions and answers. The goal is not to generate more comments, but better Q&A. As such, you should assume that ...
Shog9's user avatar
  • 512
7 votes

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

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 ...
Ben N's user avatar
  • 40.2k
6 votes

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

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 ...
music2myear's user avatar
  • 40.6k
5 votes

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

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 ...
Run5k's user avatar
  • 15.8k
3 votes

How do we prevent upvotes on every bad question?

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 ...
bertieb's user avatar
  • 7,344
2 votes

retaliatory down votes

At various times, my questions have received answers not properly addressing the original question, but instead targeted at a different question. Often, the user posting the answer will decline ...
Ramhound's user avatar
  • 41.9k
2 votes
Accepted

Are upvotes retroactive?

No, these votes are not retroactive. If you want your vote to count, you'll have to vote again on the same post once you have privileges. Until then, your attempted vote is simply recorded as "...
gparyani's user avatar
  • 1,845
2 votes

How did I exceed the reputation cap today from only upvotes?

Apparently you downvoted another answer, or had something else happened that made you lose 1 reputation. This "gap" is filled by a later upvote on your answer.
iBug's user avatar
  • 10.3k
1 vote

Should question owners be able to down vote on answers?

Voting down has the meaning that the post is of a very low quality; but it's still frequently used with a meaning of "I don't agree with it", "it doesn't work for me". This is nor different for the ...
Máté Juhász's user avatar

Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible