Skip to main content
Meta Stack Exchange

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

Required fields*

11
  • 2
    I would suggest that the ability to ask good questions and write good answers does correlate pretty well with being able to identify good questions and good answers. It may not be causation, but it sure is better than nothing. Commented Sep 20, 2023 at 17:24
  • 3
    @JonCuster I think the basic exposure to and familiarity with how things work is probably most important, after which reputation may become more arbitrary. ... but that basic exposure is exactly what they're proposing be removed. Commented Sep 20, 2023 at 18:11
  • Forgive the quibble but we're not proposing to "remove the criterion" and I find that framing is unfair. We're proposing to test removing the criterion on sites that volunteer for it. That test plan includes a commitment to actively monitor the sites during the test and seek out indications of users voting in ways outside current community norms so that they can be investigated and determined if they are problematic and would need to be addressed. We have even stated that the test metrics are not final because we want the sites participating to help us define them. Commented Sep 21, 2023 at 19:52
  • We additionally outline that we will (with the sites) identify a rollback plan should the voting behaviors lead to issues we can't quickly address by adding to existing tools and automations or the volume of issues becomes too much for the moderators or site to handle. Creating additional criteria when we don't even know for sure that they're needed could lead to us simply replacing existing bad barriers with new ones. Many of the ideas that have been floated about additional criteria I've outright said that we've either considered or would consider if we see a need for them. Commented Sep 21, 2023 at 19:58
  • 2
    Votes by definition are the backbone of how this platform indicates quality. If there's a drop in the percentage and absolute number of votes and voters per day (which is seen on many sites), keeping current barriers to voting is going to eventually cause quality indicators to be non-existent. When we say we want to spur participation and engagement through voting rather than through projects like Jobs or Documentation, we're trying to invest in and increase quality signal on these sites rather than pulling engagement off to non-core Q&A work. Commented Sep 21, 2023 at 20:09
  • 1
    Along with this drop in voting, I'm pretty sure there's fewer users who write more than one answer in some period of time along with fewer curators, editors, flaggers, even people willing to be moderators. Here's a comment on this page of what not earning votes on good content can do to user motivation. It's not about moving away from the library concept that relies on a a small group creating a big resource. Commented Sep 21, 2023 at 20:19
  • But at some point you have to ask "is that small group too small?" and start looking into why that is the case. We don't know that voting is a panacea. It probably isn't. But if we can do it carefully, thoughtfully in a data-driven way, it might start moving the needle back towards having more quality signal and more incentives for new content creators who might become the next million-rep user. We want to let people show us they can vote well and figure out where to give them a nudge if it's needed rather than assuming they won't. Commented Sep 21, 2023 at 20:23
  • 2
    @Catija If long-term users participate less, and you replace them with new users who don't know what's going on, or who don't really care about the quality of the site, that'll probably push long-term users further away. On 2 of my most frequented sites I just stopped participating altogether because too many others don't seem to care about quality, or they're actively and loudly opposed to having pretty much any quality standards (not that those users were necessarily new). Whether you "see a need" for additional criteria depends to a significant degree on what you want the site to be. ... Commented Sep 21, 2023 at 23:29
  • 2
    @Catija If you want a high-quality Q&A, I don't see that happening without some guidance or barrier of entry for new voters. Otherwise the site will shift towards what people like instead of what meets the guidelines and what you've established is a good fit for a Q&A (and detecting that could be quite hard). Bad votes are worse than fewer votes. But "high-quality Q&A" doesn't seem like it's been a goal for probably the last decade or so (even if something in line with that pops up every once in a while). Commented Sep 21, 2023 at 23:29
  • 2
    @Catija There are drops in participation for reasons that have been detailed on Meta. I don't think "too few voters" ranks in like the top 10 reasons, so this seems to be less about bringing those people back and more about just pumping some life back into the site. How many users are too few? I expect on Stack Overflow, you can cut the users down to 10%, or even 1%, and that would only improve things. There seems to be some odd combination of too many question askers, so many duplicate and unanswered questions, but also too many answerers, so frequently duplicate answers per question. Commented Sep 21, 2023 at 23:29
  • @Catija More voters doesn't seem like it would improve things there. But then you aren't proposing this for Stack Overflow (yet). Maybe some smaller sites are desperately in need of more voters, I wouldn't know. I suspect more would struggle with having too few people asking or answering questions, or too few moderating (voting is a small part of that, but more for downvoting than upvoting, and in my experience, new users are much more likely to upvote things, even bad things, which certainly doesn't help). Commented Sep 21, 2023 at 23:30