Optimizing For Pearls, Not Sand
In March 2010, we rebalanced our reputation system to favor answers.
While we value good questions (and asking a great question is absolutely an art), we want to explicitly encourage people to provide the best possible answers. Without people interested in providing good answers, the questions are moot. We know that answers have more intrinsic value than questions, and the reputation balance should reflect that.
The question asker already enjoys a substantial benefit beyond reputation gain from upvotes on their question — namely, they get great answers to their question! Thus, the asker shouldn’t need as much reputation gain.
In November 2010, we began to actively block low quality questions, too:
We believe asking questions on our site is a privilege, not a right. If, after a few fair attempts, you haven’t been able to prove that your contributions to a particular Stack Exchange make it at least … not-worse … then we reserve the right to refuse your questions. If we don’t do our part to cull the bad questions, then we risk alienating the true experts who provide what really matters: the answers!
Last month we made voting more visible and added 10 additional “question-only” daily votes to encourage people to vote more on questions, so we can better discern their value.
Users intuit that answers are the real unit of work in any Q&A; system and tend to favor answers in their voting.
Continuing in that same vein, we have two more changes to formally announce today:
- We now limit users (and IP addresses) to a maximum of 6 questions per day and 50 questions per month.
- Downvotes on questions no longer cost the casting user 1 reputation, so they are effectively “free”.
Perhaps you’ve noticed a theme here. Incoming questions are a universal constant, all around us in countless billions. But answers — truly brilliant, amazing, correct answers — are as rare as pearls. Thus, questions are merely the sand that produces the pearl. If we have learned anything in the last three years, it is that you optimize for pearls, not sand.
Consider the question Does torture work well as an interrogation technique? on Skeptics. Is this a brilliant question? Is it even an original question? No, it’s just a mundane grain of sand question that could have been asked by anyone at any time. What makes it remarkable is the incredible answer on that question by Larian LeQuella with over 100 upvotes.
Sand, meet pearl.
That’s why we’re determined to keep question quality high, even at the cost of refusing a little sand. It’s true that you can’t have Q&A; without questions, but having the wrong sorts of questions is far more dangerous. The fastest way to kill any Q&A; site is to flood it with low-quality questions. I think Mark Trapp summed it up best in this meta answer:
To put it another way, when I go to a Stack Exchange home page, I see a list of questions. If most of those are terrible questions with little to no indication that I’d be wasting my time by reading them, the value proposition of visiting and participating is diminished: I have better things to do.
Compare that to answers on a specific question: I’ve made a conscious choice to look into what I think is an interesting question. I already made the decision that the question is worth my time. If I find the answers to be useless, I have a few different options, as an interested party, to register my displeasure, including writing my own answer. Being able to write your own answer is key: if your answer is good enough, it’ll rise above the junk answers and everyone will be better off for it.
There is no such action for question lists. I can’t say “these questions suck, show me this question I just thought up instead”: that’d be silly. So, it’s imperative the question list have a high signal-to-noise ratio, and removing the penalty for those users who do take the time to read a question and later find it to be useless so they can down-vote is conducive to that.
Fundamentally, answers can be filtered in ways that questions cannot. While there is a tension between having “enough” questions and a bunch of amazing, highly skilled answerers twiddling their thumbs waiting around for something to do, in the long run we’d much rather err on the side of having interesting and on-topic questions for these folks to sink their teeth into.
We feel that the world is awash in questions, but not answers. Answers are the real unit of work in any Q&A; system. Therefore, the only logical thing to do is to maximize the happiness and enjoyment of answerers. If this means aggressively downvoting or closing unworthy and uninteresting questions, so be it. Without a community of people willing to answer questions, it really doesn’t matter if there are questions at all, does it?
5 Comments
Good morning/afternoon/evening,
I am currently still trying to understand the purpose of down votes and even after reading this entry, I am still confused. Are my questions valuable because someone else finds them worthy of his time? If I am motivated to ask, doesn’t that, on its face, indicate that at least one person was curious about something? And if what drives that question is simply wanting to know the answer, for knowledge’s sake, is that a bad thing (or one that should be down voted)?
I was under the impression that a poorly FORMED question, one which reflected no research or effort, or maybe one which is predicated on mistaken ideas might get down votes. But if the question simply states what it is and is within scope of the particular exchange, does it get down voted because people reading happen not to be interested in what the question asks? Does it need to provide the asker’s motivation for it to have value? And if that motivation is nothing more than curiosity, does the question become less valuable? If no one else shares that same curiosity, but, again, the question is in scope, then is the step beyond ignoring it, that is, actively down voting, appropriate? There are plenty of questions which don’t tickle my fancy, so I scroll past them. It seems to me (though I’m just a guy, you know) that down voting because the question (or the reason for asking) doesn’t click with a reader seems unnecessary.
Is downvoting a punishment to show that internet space should not be taken up by a question that only interests the asker? Is there a requirement that the asker find a way to justify why he is asking, or risk the downvotes?
Any further insight would be appreciated.
Dan
IMHO – the time has come for the “Downvote” option to be removed. This (10-year-old) page explains how it was *supposed* to work: https://superuser.com/help/privileges/vote-down – but almost nobody follows those rules anymore.
It is also a logical mistake. There are 3 possible options – (1) – Click UpVote. (2) Don’t click upvote. (3) Downvote.
It makes no sense to have THREE options for a binary outcome. Either the question/answer is useful (anyone who is a subject-matter expert or understands the topic will know when this is true) – or – it is not. There’s a “flag” system for everything else (spam, abuse, etc).
Downvotes make no sense – there is only ever ONE kind of person qualified to make any kind of usefulness vote on anything – it’s the person who found it useful (or perhaps also the expert who knows it is). In the majority of situations, what is “not useful” to any individual is NO INDICATION that it’s universally “not useful” to EVERYONE. There’s trillions of topics in the world, and nobody can be an expert in 99.99999% of those – so it makes no sense to allow 100% of those people to decide that something is “not useful” – almost all of them do not really know.
There is no policing of Downvotes, no appeals against them, and in general – it is destroying the community: helpful people are being punished for contributing helpful things. Useful knowledge is also being destroyed when strongly downvoted answers get deleted.
Abuse – people with the power to downvote and moderate appear (in my moderate experience) to be abusing this power. There’s a cliche about “power corrupts” – it’s possibly not everyone, but it IS a very large number of users who appear to be getting some kind of psychological satisfaction from “bullying” new users via this button. Getting rid of the useless Downvote option is a nice way to incentivise those users to move away to other platforms and stop damaging this one.
It is being near-universally misused, acting now as a weapon to force conformity. The stated and original purpose of it is being totally ignored: “This question does not show any research effort; it is not clear or not useful” (for questions) and “This answer is not useful” (for answers).
I’ve chosen a username that I suspect some people can see which I suspect is causing a lot of my woes – it appears that Downvotes are also being used in my case (and no doubt others) as some kind of expression of disapproval at my decision not to personally identify myself.
e.g. here’s a random useful question with useful answer:- https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/559892/software-recovery-of-3ware-raid
I cannot upvote it (makes no sense – there’s probably less than a dozen people in the world who would ever need to do/know this – I’m one – I should be allowed to upvote)
(and as of now – at the time I’m writing this:-)
The Upvoted” “answer” is not an answer at all – it’s an abusive rant that has nothing whatsoever to do with the question.
The Working answer has been downvoted to some negative amount, because (shock horror) the product that’s needed to accomplish this task isn’t free.
We have no way to know how many MORE useful answers might have been given – things that get downvoted also get deleted (happens to me more often that seems healthy).
(C) My proposal. Retire the “Downvote”. Spam and abuse can be solved via captca and reporting, and the original “Upvote” (or not) is entirely sufficient for marking useful things when they are.
update: I notice there are 71 downvotes cast for every 1 upvote on average: https://data.stackexchange.com/meta.stackexchange/query/edit/1414796 – that clearly shows the system is being abused… Downvotes require 125 reputation – upvotes only 15 – further highlighting the extreme abuse of this mechanism (i.e. downvotes are 7100% more prevalent, even though its 8 times easier for anyone to upvote)
“It makes no sense to have THREE options for a binary outcome. Either the question/answer is useful (anyone who is a subject-matter expert or understands the topic will know when this is true) – or – it is not.”
No, downvotes are a must. If a user isn’t worried about their reputation score lowering, they wouldn’t care as much when crafting an answer or asking a good question since there isn’t any fear of a consequence. Imagine if Society was “binary” with Justice and only implemented a reward only model– gives you pats on the back when you’re a good Samaritan, but simply turns the other cheek when you commit insurance fraud.
More people would be committing insurance fraud…
Answers and questions are more complex than yes or no, and the difference between a quality, well thought out, technical answer/question and a bad one is light years. A bad answer in a popular question that goes unnoticed and not downvoted will cause wayy more harm to the community who isn’t aware that it’s actually incorrect or poorly constructed. They could literally copy and paste the answer’s code or implement the incorrect ideas from the answer in their applications because they wouldn’t know any better.
Being able to see that these questions/answers were downvoted provides the community a way to filter out things that provide little to no value to both the community and the site.
I completely agree with Chris on this topic. Being able to downvote here on StackOverflow, only pushes away the people that are answering questions as there is no way to protect against downvoters and they are not even required to mention a reason for the downvote. Also it is scaring the new users to ask questions because they might get downvoted. I think we should either improve the functionality or remove it completely so this awesome page won’t become full of trolls and people scared to ask questions.
On
https://dba.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/vote-down
it says:
“Downvotes on answers remove 1 reputation from you, the voter.”
I don’t understand: if an answer is really trash, why should the one flagging it have to pay for cleaning up the trash?