Programmers Stack Exchange question downvoting, what to do?

Question

I've taken a shine to the Programmers Stack Exchange lately, but one thing I've noticed is it seems to have what I think anybody looking at the questions list would classify as excessive down voting of questions (not answers, the answers seem to get fairly normative treatment from what I've seen)

My questions are I guess: Can anybody say why? Can anybody propose a solution?

I feel like there are a lot of questions which are programming related and have distinct answers which are voted down because they may not be very high level, or sometimes confusion among the poster leads people to downvote instead of commenting/editing to guide the question to make more sense. Again I ask, does anyone have ideas about what can be done to help solve this? Feel free to comment if your assessment of programmers is that the level of downvoting is completely applicable based on the questions being asked, perhaps I am giving the questioners too much credit.

I would very much like to hear from the moderators there on their opinions as well as any frequent participants.

Edit:
Just a few quick ones to give examples of the things I'm seeing: What's the difference between overloading a method and overriding it in Java? I grant the english seems broken, but it is a language agnostic question about a software concept. https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/164342/which-design-pattern-to-use-when-using-orm Again it has specifics but those are for the background, the question itself is about design patterns in relation to ORM tools which is a generalized design question.

That's just off hand right now, perhaps the downvotes are correct though. Again I am asking what we might do to get less downvoting, perhaps that means increasing question quality, to which I submit this request for ideas to that ends? Is there perhaps a way to put the FAQ more directly in front of people before they ask on there?

Answer 1

Part 1: statistics

(Skipping over the lies and damn lines)

Programmers has one of the highest all-time average score on questions of all sites. Out of 34 launched sites (I'm excluding metas), only Skeptics, RPG, SF&F and CSTheory have a higher average. If you count the all-time average number of votes (this query conflates questions and answers), Programmers comes 4th after Skeptics, CSTheory and SF&F. If you only count downvotes, Programmers comes 3rd after Skeptics and CSTheory. Programmers's all-time downvote/upvote ratio (again, conflating questions and answers) is 5.6%, rank 22 out of 34.

The recent trend is different, however. If you only count votes cast in 2012, then Programmers's voting amount is average, and it has the second-highest proportion of downvotes at 12.7%. Looking at monthly trends, the proportion of downvotes has been steadily increasing during the lifetime of the site. (Note that entries before 2010-09-01 are solely made of votes on questions migrated from SO, cast on SO before the migration.)

It's normal to see more recent downvotes, because the total number of downvotes includes those on highly-downvoted posts that eventually get deleted. For example, Wordpress (the site with the highest proportion of downvotes in 2012) has a recorded proportion of downvotes of over 30% in the last two months for which there are statistics, against 6% to 10% in previous months — I think deletion of old crap accounts for the disappearance of many downvotes.

So I retract my initial analysis that Programmers isn't an outlier: while it is not an extreme case, there has been a rather large proportion of downvotes recently. The increase is more marked than on other sites with a large proportion of downvotes.

I'm not sure how to interpret these statistics. SEDE data includes only the posts that weren't deleted as of 2012-06-27. Does this mean that, as of the last SEDE data dump, Programmers had been lax in deleting old crap (where crap is defined by having had downvotes)? Or have there really been more downvotes and fewer upvotes? It would be interesting to see similar statistics taking deleted posts into account.

If the large proportion of recent downvotes is not just an artifact of deletion dates, the next question is the interpretation. You force an interpretation in your question by speaking of “excessive downvoting”. Is there really excessive downvoting? Or is the downvoting a reflection on the quality of incoming questions?

The first step of finding a solution is finding what the problem is. Too many downvotes? Not enough upvotes? Too many bad posts requiring downvoting? Not enough deletion (and perhaps not enough closure) of downvoted questions?

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Part 2: anecdotes

You cite two questions. Let me have a look at them.

• https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/164342/which-design-pattern-to-use-when-using-orm — score as I write: +1/-2

  Web and database applications are far from my expertise, but I have a hard time believing that this question is interesting and useful.

  The scenario is: “I am writing a small ASP.NET Web Forms application. (…) I want to use PetaPoco micro-ORM.” Uh, ok, so what will this application be doing? Is this something that has to be rock-solid by the time it's deployed, or something that's going to be continually evolving?

  The question is: “Do I still need several class library projects to separate the concerns?” That's a very broad design question. With such an unclear scenario, it's hard to give a generic answer to such a broad question.

  Furthermore, the question does not have any redeeming value of being important. If the initial decision on the breakdown in wrong, for a “small” project, refactoring isn't going to cost much.

• What's the difference between overloading a method and overriding it in Java? — score as I write: +3/-0

  It would help your complaint against downvotes if all the examples were actually downvoted. Presumably there was a downvote on the initial question, which was written in barely-comprehensible English.

  Downvoting a post where the poster has made no effort at making himself understood is perfectly legitimate (“is unclear” in the downvote tooltip). We aren't just talking about grammatical mistakes here, there's a marked lack of effort. There's one single sentence here, followed by a few related words. It's not clear what is asked; I'm not convinced that the edit respects the original meaning of the question.

  Setting aside the presentation, the other thing that makes this question a candidate for downvoting is that it “does not show an research effort”. Here's how a good question might look like: “I read about overloading and overriding in this book/this blog post/…. I understand that this example [code] demonstrates overloading and this example [code] demonstrates overriding. But I don't understand why this example [code] is overloading. The author claims without explanation, but I think it is overriding because [explanation]. Why is that last example overloading?”

So my provisional conclusion is that there is no problem with good questions being downvoted. There are mediocre questions that are downvoted, which is as it should be. If you think that's the case, give examples of good questions that have downvotes.

Answer 2

The downvote arrow tooltip says:

This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful

Latest questions with negative score:

• Where can I get practice questions?

No research effort, tick! Unclear, tick! Downvote!

• Apple Developer Enterprise Program?

Don't know what this one is about. Skip!

• Relocation to USA or Germany

Someone please delete this. Downvote!

• Is “Application Programming Interface” a bad name?

At first I thought the OP was quoting a reputable source, then I realized he's quoting himself, so there's no actual research effort. There might be, but I'm not going to read his blog to find out. Would have downvoted if this one was at 0 or -1, skipping it now.

• Agile Unified Process

No research effort, tick! Pointless question, tick! Downvote.

• Which design pattern to use when using ORM? (one of your examples)

Extremely broad, unanswerable, uninteresting. Useful to anyone but the OP? No! Downvote!

• Learn WinRT or Unity 3d?

What the hell is this I don't even... Downvote!

• Good practices for large scale development/delivery of software

Meh. Skipped.

• Learning iPhone Development

Which are the basic steps for learning Iphone development? Ah, Google must be broken for this guy! Downvote!

• CSS/JS frameworks for Android Holo UI

Android Holo UI might be a specific enough parameters for this one to not be yet another "pick for me, please" question. Meh. Skipped.

• Applying for MS CS with an un-related Bachelor's Degree

Meh. Skipped.

• How to select li range and move them inside div

Flagged for deletion. OP posted an off topic question here by mistake, a moderator explained why it's off topic and had to be closed, OP seems to have understood why his question is off topic. No point in keeping this around anymore.

• Can jQuery be used server side?

Profoundly confused question, OP doesn't seem to have even visited jQuery's website once. No research effort, tick! Unclear, tick! Downvote!

• Video Lectures for the book “Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective”

I don't even... Downvote!

• Fitting it together, database, reporting, applications in C#

Too long to read. Skipped.

• Finding work as a college student

Too long to read. Skipped.

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I don't agree with you there's a problem. I'm very new around here, but I can tell you that one of the things that lured me in was the "promise" that this site is about "professional programmers":

Programmers — Stack Exchange is a site for professional programmers who are interested in getting expert answers on conceptual questions about software development. If you have a question about...

I've even written about this, on a different but related Meta discussion:

Programmers is not supposed to be a beginners site, and a lot of closed questions come from beginners. I don't think there is anything we can do here it is only natural that the site will have more closed questions than others. I like the advanced aspect of the site, and the work that is being done in the disciplined aspect of it, questions like this one should be the norm not the exception.

As a newer user, representing no one but myself, this is what I have to say:

• I rarely upvote a negatively scored question. Not because I go with the flow, but because usually I find the negative score justified.
• I like it that Programmers is trying to be a bit more disciplined than other sites.

I am not a professional programmer, bit young for that, but I have learned a lot since the first day I've joined the site. One of the more important lessons: A professional environment is tough, and it takes skills to survive in it. The scrutiny poorly researched questions face has made me a far better researcher, to the point that I now find 99% of the answers I'm looking for on Stack Overflow or Programmers just by searching.

Perhaps you want more of a "let's all hold hands and pat ourselves in the back" kind of site. I don't see anything wrong with that, but it wouldn't be a site for professional programmers who are interested in getting expert answers on conceptual questions about software development..

I'll close with Gilles' conclusion, with which I agree 100%:

So my provisional conclusion is that there is no problem with good questions being downvoted. There are mediocre questions that are downvoted, which is as it should be. If you think that's the case, give examples of good questions that have downvotes.

Answer 3

Programmers gets a lot of crap, down-votes and close votes are are how crap is dealt with. We try to avoid letting crap stay too long here, not all sites are like this.

Those of you that think down votes are too prevalent go out there and up vote the good stuff, quit trying to defend the indefensible.

Answer 4

I think I can identify some of the reasons why

• The site scope has changed dramatically from what it originally was supposed to be. A lot of users (particularly on SO) will refer people here to ask their questions, not realizing that the question would no longer be on-topic for the site. This leads to a lot of questions getting asked that the community views as off-topic, or "bad".

• There seems to be a lot of confusion over what is on/off topic on here by new users, and older users have gotten tired of explaining the same thing repeatedly. This leads to them just downvoting and moving on instead of repeating the same explanation they just gave on another question.

• Some close votes give an automatic downvote, and we get many close votes

• Question downvotes don't cost anything, so people are quite willing to vote questions down.

• Downvoting seems to be encouraged on meta and in chat

  I watch meta and chat a lot, and I see a lot of users promoting downvoting, or bragging about their downvote record. Downvotes are often recommended when someone asks about what can be done about low quality questions, although I've also seen it recommended as a way to push questions off the front page too.

• Some active users just see a few key words or phrases, (such as "Books" or "What's the best...") and automatically downvote and vote to close without actually reading the question. For example, see this meta question.

What can be done about it?

Some users don't actually view the number of downvotes as a problem. Others do.

Personally I think it's a problem, but I'm honestly not sure what one person alone can do about it. Most solutions I can think of would require either a community effort, or for SE to step in.

A few things I can think of:

• To fix the number of downvotes we see, we really need to fix the quality of questions that get asked. The easy solution is to make new users understand the site scope better. The not-so-easy part is figuring out how. If you have any ideas, feel free to post them here: What can we do to help users understand our site better?

  I know I've suggested this many times and SE has denied it, but one thing I think would help would be to rename the site to match it's scope, or change the scope to match the site name

• When promoting downvotes on meta, make sure to include instructions to leave a comment about why you're downvoting. Sure users don't have to follow it, but the guideline will be there for users that are only trying to "do the right thing".

• Promote the SE app which lets you automatically insert generic comments. If you find yourself downvoting a lot and being tired of leaving the same comments, I'd suggest checking out this SE app which lets you quickly and easily add generic comments.

• This only applies to a few users (you know who you are), but stop bragging about the # of downvotes you have. You shouldn't be proud of the fact you have contributed more negative votes than positive ones to your site. You guys are high rep users of the site, and people will look up to you and try to follow your example. Downvoting can be good, but I feel your attitude about it takes it to an unhealthy level.

• Probably not a good solution, but SE could make question downvoting cost -1 again. I'm pretty sure SE removed the -1 downvote cost in the first place because they didn't want people to be hesitant in downvoting questions over 1 reputation, so I don't think this will happen and probably wouldn't be a good solution.