Abigail

It seems reasonable to assume that those who upvoted such nodes did not see the flaws that you did. Upvotes are fairly self-explanatory: they simply mean that a reader thought the post was good (even if that perception is misguided). I suppose there's a chance that some upvoter, by explaining, might enlighten you to merits you had not discerned, but I doubt it.

Downvotes, on the other hand, are not self-explanatory. Posters, apart from trolls, don't post things they know to be flawed. They post things they think contribute some useful information -- they know why they should be upvoted. They may or not be able to figure out why they're downvoted.

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The PerlMonk tr/// Advocate

Isn't this somewhat of a double standard?

If upvotes are based simply on perception, why not accept that downvotes are also based simply on perception?

My perception, FWIW, is that mild criticism is much harder to accept than mild praise.

In fact I'd go so far as to say that people will agree with almost any statement made about them provided that it is a mild compliment.

Some recent, related threads:
Possible changes to Voting/XP
Voting etiquette
Why down vote is soo easy?
/msg me the reason of --

When I have a node that's received a negative reputation, I'm usually able to go back, re-read what I posted, read the comments the node has received, and understand why it got downvoted. For the record, I don't feel that I've ever been downvoted for asking questions.... at least not enough for one of my questions to receive a negative rep.

The question of why nodes get downvoted comes up a lot. Sometimes the answer is more inflamatory than the --. Sometimes it's just someone being careless (that can often account for a brief -1 rep). And other times, there will be criticisms posted in followup to the node. And then there's always the annoyance factor: the negative rep that gets delt to someone who asks a question and follows it up with a question that makes it obvious he didn't listen to the previous answers.

At any rate, don't worry about shallow negatives. Once and awhile you get a node that just attracts a few --'s. Votes don't equate to money, skill-level, or anything other than just the sum of all of the fleeting opinions of people who read what you write.

I would like to *encourage* voters to provide information for downvotes.

I'd like to see more of that, too.

I loathe to see OPs being downvoted for a bad question though.
We ought to tell them why the question wasn't done well. (Lest they learn anything)

Otherwise we encourage people to always ask questions anonymously.
I am afraid that encourages trolling, as we've experienced recently.

Cheers, Sören

In my opinion, questions should be exempt from voting completely. Homework aside, a poor quality question still represents someone needing some assistance, and if we -- a question, what exactly are we conveying? Do we really want the OP to restate the question?

I see the voting as almost a Darwinian system designed to encourage high-quality answers. ++ complete, thoughtful, accurate, or maybe just succinct answers. -- obvious "me too" duplicates, inappropriate golfing, non-portable solutions (where it matters), inefficient or just plain wrong answers.

That's what my votes have come to mean.

In my opinion, questions should be exempt from voting completely.

• Yes, very good point. - There seems to be no reason to vote for the quality of a perlquestion.
• and yet - No, there may be a need to downvote a flame, trolling, non perl-community advertisement, or a post that's otherwise off-topic and of no relevance:
  Make it appear in Worst Nodes for the monks to notice so it will eventually be reaped.
  And then there are questions where you read the monk in question has worked hard to make the discoveries he presents to you, but hasn't reached his goal.
  You will want to upvote him for the effort sharing his work experience with Perl.

Cheerio, Sören

In my opinion, questions should be exempt from voting completely.

But, but, asking questions is a fast way of gaining XP! It's far from uncommon to have the root node (the question) have the most node-reputation of the entire thread - especially if it was frontpaged. Just take a look at the best nodes every now and then.

Now, what we need is a voting system on the acts of frontpaging and approving.

Abigail

Personally, I'm also curious as to the rationale when someone downvotes something I've written. I put time and energy into doing it, and I'd like to learn why someone felt it should be downvoted (rather than just left alone). Definitely, if I've make a mistake on technical grounds, I'd like to know what it is.

At the risk of provoking an argument of competing voting systems, something I like at slashdot is that there are descriptive types of votes. (e.g. "interesting", "insightful", "offtopic", "troll", etc.) As a result, there's some guidance as to why someone voted that way.

I agree with not adding a "must post comment" requirement -- that raises the hurdle to vote in the first place. But perhaps there could be a way to annotate a vote, and then to show users not just the total votes on their nodes, but the distribution of annotations. E.g., 10 "insightful" and 2 "technically incorrect". Perhaps a dropdown next to the voting options with various standard comments. (Best with some javascript to change the dropdown to positive or negative based on whether it's ++ or --.)

Another option might be to make a "/msg" textline available right next to the voting options to allow voters to include a quick comment there if they so choose.

Nodes that get downvoted with no explanation tend to be of a type where the attitude of the poster is the problem, not the actual technical content.

Personally I'd leave the voting system as it is...

Michael

I think my post was misunderstood. Please allow me to clarify.

Is there a way to mark a node as technically incorrect? Yes there is, it requires either voting or posting a comment. I was asking that we recomment to voters, if they are downvoting for a technical reason to post a comment as well. This is to serve the readers and make it easier for them to know which responses are incorrect. I never mentioned revamping the voting system.

Efforts may be better spend for lots of positive vote building nodes rather than focusing on few negative votes if voting is an issue for you. If you read a good question carefully which has lots of good answers, without reading the answers, try to come up with an answer and then equate your answer with other answers. You will be able to learn the what are good 'types' of posts accepted by mass here.

Have I still not made my request clear? I don't care about votes. As a reader of this site (any where from 1-4 hours per day) I would like to see people post more corrections. Some/Many (I don't want to post a made up statistic) people do this already. But I would that it be an official recommendation of PM that if you are going to downvote a node for TECHNICAL reasons, that you also post a comment explaining why the node is technically incorrect.

One thought I had considered before is forcing a reason to be entered with each vote. This may put too much strain on PM system resources, though.

It would also cause me to never vote. It'd be too much trouble. Who'd want to look at all the notes anyway? Yuck! There'd be jillions of them all over.

It'd be rare that I would look at notes for upvotes, but if one of my nodes has a significant number of downvotes, I want to know why.

This is just an idea to help people think before they vote. I fully expect that there would be fewer votes cast. That may also mean that XP becomes a more meaningful indicator of community acceptance of a node.

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Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated

I am voting neither up or down on your post because you have a valid comment, but you do not offer any other solutions. ;-)

Maybe you can help figure out a way that would provide more information to the people reading the nodes? As a reader I would like to know if someones post is incorrect.

For the record, most downvotes I have cast today were for condescension towards others ideas, offering trite responses slightly beyond RTFM, and elitism, something I have very little tolerance for in the monastery. If I was wrong and I just misinterpreted attitude that wasn't there, or that is just someone's nature, others will upvote the node and restore the correct order of the universe. I always upvote good discussion, or things that make me think, even when I don't care for the discussion.

And yeah, I downvoted the root node for whininess. Rule #7 of Perl Club. Don't care about XP.

And yeah, I downvoted the root node for whininess. Rule #7 of Perl Club. Don't care about XP.

Can you please show me in my post where I mentioned that I do care about XP? And where I whined about it? I am not trying to argue, but I thought I did a good job stating that I did not care about XP. Here are a couple quotes that emphasise my point, from the root node:

I have no problems with downvoting and receiving XP for doing so. I also have no problem with someone downvoting my node especially if I am incorrect.

Update 2 My primary concern is not that *I* know why *MY* post has been downvoted, but so *OTHER* readers know if a post is technically incorrect.

Update 3 My main point was that I had seen some posts that were incorrect and downvoted but no-one posted a correction.

This quote from this node: Have I still not made my request clear? I don't care about votes. As a reader of this site (any where from 1-4 hours per day) I would like to see people post more corrections. Some/Many (I don't want to post a made up statistic) people do this already. But I would that it be an official recommendation of PM that if you are going to downvote a node for TECHNICAL reasons, that you also post a comment explaining why the node is technically incorrect.

Thanks,
disciple