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    Among other issues with this answer, SO certainly doesn't know "when a new user receives a quality answer but they downvote it". If we could programmatically detect quality answers, we wouldn't need voting, and LLM chatbots would work a lot better. Commented Sep 19, 2023 at 21:33
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    @RyanM If SO can rely on 3 users with the "Close a question" privilege to deduce that a question should be closed, surely it can rely on a similar metric to decide an answer is likely of good quality - e.g. written by a user with, say 10,000 rep and upvoted by two or more users with 5,000 rep or some variant of rep + upvotes. Please also clarify what the "other issues" are. Thank you. Commented Sep 19, 2023 at 22:31
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    Reputation is, first and foremost, an indication of answer (or question) quantity, rather than quality. A lot of thought has been put into moving away from reputation as a gate for features; the last thing we want to do is add more dependencies on it. I've seen plenty of users with thousands of reputation whose answers are absolutely terrible (often plagiarized). Commented Sep 20, 2023 at 0:32
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    Additionally, how many "new user"s actually have the 125 rep required to downvote? Also, voting is an individual expression of whether the answer was useful. If it was not, then downvoting it is entirely appropriate; perhaps the answerer should have clarified the "poorly expressed" question before guessing at the answer. We need more voting on answers, not less. Another issue: how does one detect a request for clarification vs. any other comment? Commented Sep 20, 2023 at 0:32
  • I defer to your experience as a moderator in seeing and understanding users' behaviour. I still feel that SO could do more to encourage users to vote more. Commented Sep 20, 2023 at 1:37
  • @RyanM I'd say, every time you find one of those users with "thousands" of reputation and frankly terrible answers... well, report them :-) Oh wait, you're a mod yourself hehe :) Commented Oct 31, 2023 at 23:42