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While a positive reputation increase (received upvote, accepted answer, association bonus...) is immediately notified, why a negative score is not notified at all? If you receive some upvotes and some downvotes, then you have the notification with the sum of the increase. In case of only downvotes you do not have any notification, I note it just when I visit the Activity section in my profile.

Just to be clear, I am not against downvoting: I would like to known when someone did not like my question or answer, it could make me check if there is something wrong or something that should be clarified. In some case the downvoting comes with constructive comments and then you have the comment notification, but most cases do not fall in this scenario.

Could the "negative score" be a useful notification?

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Just to clarify, as this is tagged as a feature request, is the purpose of the post to suggest such a feature? If so, you might want to edit the title to positively request that feature, instead of the current title asking why the feature doesn't exist. \$\endgroup\$
    – V2Blast
    Commented Oct 10, 2020 at 22:38
  • \$\begingroup\$ @V2Blast Initially, I just wanted to ask why there is no such a feature, but I had to put one tag among discussion, support, bug and feature-request: since the most related one to my question is the latter, I added the final question, even if asking of a new feature was not my principal intent. \$\endgroup\$
    – Eddymage
    Commented Oct 12, 2020 at 5:47

1 Answer 1

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This feature has been requested before on the network meta: Display lost/negative reputation in topbar achievements. Despite the obvious support from the community (given the score), it was declined by staff members, who commented/answered:

The live update feature is there to show you the good stuff that happened to your account (rep gains, badges and notifications).

(source)

It's just too hard to see the number of people motivated to improve their posts outweighing the number of people who will be upset by every downvote or want to start an argument about each one.

(source)

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  • \$\begingroup\$ So the design is devoted to avoid making the users too "unhappy" in case of bad questions/answer, for what I understand. \$\endgroup\$
    – Eddymage
    Commented Oct 10, 2020 at 16:04
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    \$\begingroup\$ @Eddymage Also to avoid users getting themselves into trouble because the things the system notifies them about spur them to start fights. Like... if you have a feature you could add, but it can and will result in an increase in rudeness, abusive behaviour, unrest, personal attacks, and then also flags, suspension, and people leaving the platform, and this will be the case for perpetuity rather than just for now... why would you add it? (And that's leaving out that it might discourage people to downvote when it's appropriate, to avoid themself or someone else being attacked.) \$\endgroup\$
    – doppelgreener
    Commented Oct 10, 2020 at 18:34
  • \$\begingroup\$ @doppelgreener Yep, that's clear. I imagined something like that, it seems the same reason why in several social networks there are no "dislike" button. I was wondering about the possible positive aspects of such a feature, but it seems that they are very few (or any) in comparison with the negative ones. \$\endgroup\$
    – Eddymage
    Commented Oct 10, 2020 at 19:43

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