Are there some serial downvoters on Stack Overflow?

[Alain_Reve]

I have a problem with this site: some people pay more attention to form than to content.

If I post a question which doesn't really follow the rules, I very quickly get downvotes. Not more than 7 in my case.

If I post a question which follows the rules, I may wait days for an answer, and I may never receive an answer, but I get no upvotes.

So I think there's something basically unfair about the system. If you get donwvotes for posting a question which is considered bad, shouldn't you also receive upvotes for a question which is considered good?

Please don't get me wrong, I think the vast majority of Stack Overflow users are either decent people or people who just mind their own business.

But I'm also beginning to suspect that there are people who enjoy hammering others. Giving upvotes is no fun to them, but giving down votes makes their day.

They seem to be online night and day - hey, get a life! - and to scan new questions, looking for one to downvote. This corrupts the whole voting system, which is supposed to be fair.

I think the fix would be easy: you cannot cast more downvotes than upvotes. Whatever your reputation is.

Some are also ferociously defending the system. It's some kind of religion to them, and they are fanatics. If you dare criticize it, you are immediately downvoted, whatever you're saying and however much you may have a reason of saying it.

If I posted this on meta stack overflow, it would immediately get downvoted. And my post would probably get closed.

Even constructive criticism seems to be illegal there.

The problem is, people can downvote or upvote anonymously and without saying why. And some people abuse that right. They're a small minority, sure, but they're an annoying minority and their behavior is highly offensive.

[smarx007]

> Some are also ferociously defending the system. It's some kind of religion to them, and they are fanatics.

I think some are just more aware that StackOverflow as a whole is a complex functioning system and not just a collection of standalone questions. Therefore, their behavior is focused more on the well-being of the system rather than a singe question or a single user.

> I have a problem with this site: some people pay more attention to form than to content.

I would say, people pay an equally high attention to form as content, again because form really matters on a scale of million questions, which is sometimes hard for people to appreciate who drop in to ask a single question and leave.

> If I post a question which doesn't really follow the rules, I very quickly get downvotes. Not more than 7 in my case. > If I post a question which follows the rules, I may wait days for an answer, and I may never receive an answer, but I get no upvotes.

For the first posts and questionable posts, there is a queue for "first questions" and you get some number of them a day (I get up to 80). Which means there are lots of eyes on such posts. You need a certain number of downvotes to close a question, that's why you tend to get a limited amount and get them quick. To be fair, the guidelines don't mention downvoting at all:

    How to work through this queue:

    Edit or share feedback on questions that are good, but could use some help.
    Choose Looks OK if the post is fine as-is.
    Be sure to upvote good posts to encourage new users.
    Skip the task if you aren't sure which action to take.

On the other hand, for your question to get on my radar and get an answer, you need to tag it 'oslc', 'rdf', or 'semantic web'. There will be a very small number of people monitoring these.

> Even constructive criticism seems to be illegal there.

I think it's a matter of perspective (i.e. lots of criticism says "it works poorly in my case" without considering if 100k developers did what they tried to do every single day), and to be fair, SO's platform-centric view could be a bit more user-centric.

[philomath_mn]

> I think some are just more aware that StackOverflow as a whole is a complex functioning system and not just a collection of standalone questions. Therefore, their behavior is focused more on the well-being of the system rather than a singe question or a single user.

Totally agree with this. Stack Overflow has many flaws, but most users need to think more about the system as a whole. In that context, it becomes clear that the goal of Stack Overflow is not to answer your specific question, but to create a useful body of knowledge for the general userbase.

[marto1]

I was just about to post something very similar. I think it's definitely the "Review Queue" system at play here and it has proven quite ruthless to new users posting questions/answers with SO partially mitigating this with marking said users with "hey, that's a new user, please be nice" when you do reviews.

[Alain_Reve]

"Be sure to upvote good posts to encourage new users." This guideline should definitely receive more attention.

[bjourne]

Ah, you seem to have had a run in with the down-vote brigade. :) Not nearly as annoying as the close-vote brigade or the comment brigade though. It's not uncommon for them to nitpick on pointless details, ask for clarifications on issues already clarified, or demand that you include links in your question even though those would be totally redundant. Many seem to suffer from Jesus-complex. Apparently, its their job and people asking "bad" questions are not contributing only "stealing" their time. The underappreciated janitors without whom Stack Overflow would collapse...

My advice is to not take it personally and just move on. Ask on another exchange site if the question is important, or ask with a different set of tags so that the brigadiers won't see the question.

[Alain_Reve]

Thank for for making me laugh. What do you mean, "their job"? Are people actually getting paid to downvote?

[coldtea]

>So I think there's something basically unfair about the system. If you get donwvotes for posting a question which is considered bad, shouldn't you also receive upvotes for a question which is considered good?

Could also be considered thusly:

Questions that are considered bad, people want to avoid (seeing posted) - so they get downvotes.

Questions that are considered good get upvotes.

As for questions that don't get either, doesn't mean they're good, as you seem to presume. Rather, they're neutral, and thus ignored. People don't really care about encouraging the posting of more of them.

[powerhour]

I upvote most questions I come across and downvote many answers -- most of which are incorrect or no longer correct and didn't include version information. If I could, I'd downvote comments that ask for more details and then, upon receipt, disappear forever. (Why'd ya ask?)

I don't think I'd participate at all if I had to leave comments for each action. Whenever I mention my voting rules I get angry or defensive replies from folks that don't understand.

[Alain_Reve]

That's another problem and I admit is is annoying. You can get asked for information you don't know how to obtain and so you spend time searching how to get that info and (at least in my case) quite often searching what this info means.

Then you post it and nothing comes out of it.

Once it happened that I was the person asking for more info, because I knew the answer in one particular case. Turned out that case was different and I had no advice to offer. What was I supposed to do, post "Thank you but I'm sorry, I can't help you in this case"? I decided against it, thinking that if we started behaving like that the place would be full of "I don't know" replies.

I consider that the person asking for more info meant to help. When he doesn't follow up, it doesn't mean he never came back. Maybe he came back and found out he couldn't reply in that case. Maybe he wanted to come back and couldn't find the post again. Maybe he forgot. There could be hundreds of reasons, including "maybe he died". I can't know that.

When this happens to me, I feel disappointed but not angry. IMHO, the most important point is that this person, at one point, showed he wanted to help me. And he didn't waste my time. My question is probably better with the extra information included.

In fact, that could very well be the reason why the extra info was required. My question seemed unclear or incomplete to someone, so this person asked me to improve it. That's helpful in itself.

[obviouslynotme]

Stack Overflow is not actually a Q&A site. It is a repository. It is designed so that if you search for a question, you find a good question with one or more good answers. In order to perform this mission, duplicates are removed and a baseline quality is expected.

SO has been around for a long time. The likelihood that you have run into a new issue is quite low at this point. The biggest downvote avalanches come from people trying to close the many, many duplicates posted by people who don't put in the effort to search for similar questions. That being said, I have seen this being abused before as well. It is a real problem. There should be some sort of appeal for closing that comes with consequences for either the OP or the people who voted to close.

When you do find a new problem, it is likely complex and demands effort to understand. You are expected to put in at least as much effort into presenting this question as someone will put forth trying to understand it. People are far more likely to upvote questions where it is obvious that the OP put real effort into solving the issue before asking the question. This includes making your question readable. Formatting counts.

[redditor98654]

I used to aggressively edit content for better formatting once I got enough reputation to have edit permissions on other's questions and answers. Eventually the strive dies down and I understood I wasn't adding much value. Nowadays, I will only upvote, comment or answer directly. May be these are similar newbies like me but slightly more zealous.

[giantg2]

"Are there some serial downvoters on Stack Overflow?"

Most probably. I assume any community of sufficient size has some. Most of what you describe can even take place on HN to some degree.

[nh23423fefe]

I dont have the karma to downvote this, but I would if I could.

[kordlessagain]

I voted you down for you.

[zaik]

There is no way to downvote submissions on HN.

[tom-thistime]

Sooner or later, every online forum becomes focused primarily on driving users away. This doesn't make any sense (that I know of), but it seems to be a law of nature.

SO might be immune. Then again, it might not.

[Alain_Reve]

Long live HN! Here nobody rushed in to say "SO is not a forum, it's a Q&A site". Ooops, I've just said it! Help, I got contaminated!

Seriously, I've seen what you mention happening with ubuntu forum (now mostly replaced by ask ubuntu). I think I know why.

Ubuntu forum had a section for beginner's questions. It was a nice idea, both for beginners and for not-so-advanced people who still wanted to contribute. There, you found questions you knew the answer to.

So you received faster replies if you posted in the beginner's section.

So more and more people started posting in the beginner's section. It got to the point where not only I didn't know the answer to most questions, but most of the time I couldn't even understand the questions. So I stopped reading them.

If the questions get more and more complex, the set of people able to answer them becomes smaller and smaller. People unable to answer them give up.

SO could very well go this way. Some experienced users are saying that there is a finite set of distinct questions people can ask about programming. The chances that your question is going to be closed as a duplicate is thus increasing. The accepted questions are getting more and more esoteric.

But... Wait until we all get our hands on quantum computers!

[42e6e8c8-f7b8-4]

Do your best to ask a good question with all the relevant details and what you tried and ignore the haters and fake internet points. Lots of times you can get a good answer and who cares if you're down voted into oblivion. You have a real outcome -- progress on your project.

[sm001]

I agree. This situation seems to be present on other stack exchange sites too.

[db48x]

> But I'm also beginning to suspect that there are people who enjoy hammering others. Giving upvotes is no fun to them, but giving down votes makes their day.

It’s entirely possible, but also pure conjecture unless you’ve got confessions from them.

> If I posted this on meta stack overflow, it would immediately get downvoted. And my post would probably get closed.

Yes, because you’re supposed to search for duplicate questions first and not ask them again. Meta is littered with thousands of prior questions exactly like this one. People have been naysaying for 15 years, but the site has been quite successful. At some point you just have to give up arguing with success.

> Even constructive criticism seems to be illegal there.

Stack Overflow choose a particular set of rules, and not everybody likes them. Few will say that they are perfect, but most will say that they are better than no rules at all.

In particular, one problem with the rules is that new users are usually new to the technology that they are asking about as well. They frequently lack the ability reliably _recognize_ duplicate questions. Some minor details will be different, or the wording will be unexpected, so they fail to get any help from the existing answers. You should see the Emacs Stack Exchange: hardly a week goes by without someone asking how they can add a key binding to do X while in mode Y. Since the answer rarely depends on either X or Y, the answer is invariably the same, but nothing seems to slow them down.

Learning to generalize is not the easiest thing to do. Neither is admitting that our first questions weren’t brilliant. It is difficult to have the grace to recognize that a question was already answered elsewhere, or that we phrased it badly, or that we didn’t do enough research before asking the question. That is a problem that predates Stack Overflow! See http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#stackover... for a resource that goes back even further, and has its roots in Usenet decades earlier still.

Luckily nothing requires you to care about Stack Overflow’s curious rules. If you want a community with different ones, there are plenty tools you could use to create your own. Open–source forum software such as phpBB or Discourse is readily available and already in wide use. There are thousands of existing communities out there that are not part of Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange. Just be courteous and search their archives before you ask the same questions all over again.

[Alain_Reve]

Oh, having a question closed as a duplicate is often justified, at least in my case. Last time it happened to me, it was because I used "style sheet" as a search word instead of "CSS".

If you can't be bothered searching, just post and then follow the link given in the duplicate closure message. (I'm joking, yes? I'm not really advising people to do that.)

[flakyfilibuster]

Link to your question please, so we can judge you

[Alain_Reve]

It didn't happen only once and I tend to delete downvoted or closed questions.

There's one I'm currently trying to get re-opened: https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/117556/reasonin...

I use the same name on Stack Exchange sites. I'm not hiding my opinion :).

And if you're asking me this so you can go and downvote me because I dared criticize SO, feel free :p