Can we require comments on downvotes?

Question

Perhaps I'm the only one noticing this, but I've seen several Questions and Answers around here that have been downvoted for no apparent reason. What's worse, is that no reason for the downvote is given - there's either no comments at all on the item, or there are no negative comments to address the downvote.

Is there any way for us to make leaving a comment mandatory for people who wish to downvote a Question or Answer? Alternately, is there any way for the community (Mods?) to see who is casting these downvotes and privately address abusers of this function?

I recognize the general definitions and uses of upvotes/downvotes. However, there's a noteworthy difference between the effects of the two in this environment.

To a person receiving an up-vote, it's confirmation that their question or answer is accurate and has value. This is something they presumably already believed, otherwise they would not have posted in the first place.

To someone receiving a down-vote, it suggests that their post is either erroneous or value-less. This being obviously contrary to the intent of the poster, I believe it's only reasonable and responsible that they be given a justification for the down-vote. That way, they can be led to research the errors in their post or learn to construct posts that have more value to the community.

Answer 1

The anonymous nature of the voting process is extremely valuable and integral part of how the site works. As users, we have 30 votes a day to spend how we wish. There is no rule about what votes mean. In general, votes up mean that I find the answer well written or helpful, but I could vote a post up because it included waffles or dinosaurs. I could vote down because I'm having a bad day. By only having 30 votes, the impact that I can have on the general understanding of what a vote means is minimized.

Personally, I believe we have a pretty well agreed upon definition that upvote means useful or helpful post and downvote means incorrect or irrelevant posts.

The system is strong enough and large enough to withstand votes outside that definition.

There are checks and balances, though. Downvotes are rate limited after your 300th vote so you can't downvote more than 1/3 of the time (a 2:1 up to down ratio). There are also anti-irregularity scripts that run on a regular basis to find voting anomalies (such as sock puppets and revenge votes) and remove them. There is also the community that responds by upvoting good questions and answers, even if they receive the occasional unexplained down vote. Finally, if someone shows a pattern that negatively affects the community, they can and will be banned by the mods or the team. If someone is the target of explicit malicious behavior, mods or the team should be notified.

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Blog posts regarding vote fraud and "revenge voting patterns":

• Vote Fraud and You -- description of anti-irregularity scripts
• More Voting Anomalies -- more discussion of voting fraud
• Important Reputation Rule Changes -- outlines why question votes are worth less than answer votes and rate limiting of down votes

Related conversations that have occurred on Meta Stack Overflow:

• Why do you cast downvotes on answers? -- downvote discussion and list of reasons used by some for their downvotes
• Encouraging people to explain down-votes -- Jeff's answer describes the "add a comment" reminder that occurs for all users under 2000 rep when they downvote
• Should everyone have to defend a down-vote? -- more discussion

Answer 2

No. We just have to toughen up. No one loves downvotes, but chilling the voting process by making voters open to public hassling is a huge spike in the heart of the democratic process. SE does not expose who voted how and considers it private for this reason. Even mods can't get access to that information, that's how sensitive it is.

I will note that recent sentiment on meta.SE seems to indicate that simply indicating you're downvoting in a comment isn't good or useful (a legit critique is, but discussing voting isn't a good use). Is it OK to indicate that I downvoted in a comment?

It's fine to encourage people to leave constructive criticism in the wake of a downvote, but that will never be enforced, here or SE-wide, as it's completely contrary to the site philosophy.

There are serial questionable vote detection tools mods have, but "I downvoted something and didn't comment" isn't a trigger criteria, it goes after large scale serial voting.

Answer 3

Downvoting and giving useful critiques to a post are different things and shouldn't be linked. You can easily leave a critique of a post without downvoting it, and downvoting a post should not obligate a critique—apart from the chilling effect that imposes, we should not prevent people form exercising their downvotes if they can't cogently articulate a constructive criticism.

We want lots of votes, down and up, in order for the sorting process to work properly and bubble the best to the top. We don't want to throw anything in the way of that process operating smoothly.

Similarly, we want people to be helpful in comments. We don't want to unduly link giving constructive help with downvoting.

Answer 4

Aside from the reasons about anonymity and similar topics raised by others, consider what this would mean for legitimately bad questions. The first person downvoting would add a comment. Then the second person downvoting would.. say what? Leave a comment that says "I agree with #1"? Then the next? The next?

It would lead a either people not voting because they don't want to comment or if they do vote, a ton of me-too comments spamming the comment list.

Answer 5

(this is more of an answer to other answers; it's too long to be a comment)

It's true that forcing comments on down-votes or close votes kind of breaks the system.

It's also true that we don't vote enough here on rpg.stackexchange.

But voting isn't a serious threat to the survival of the site, while views per day and the ratio of 'avid' users to 'total users' is, (see our area 51 page) and down-voting/closing can be interpreted the wrong way and lead to users abandoning the site.

Comment-less down votes and close votes are OK for regular users but for new users I really think they're a no-no; we can't risk turning away users by giving them a bad first impression of the site/community. It's important to acknowledge that - even though StackOverflow can turn away users based on early impressions because it has sufficient throughput to recover without them - we can't turn away users because we won't recover: we have 15 more days of beta, low views per day, and those who were our biggest power users have drifted away: @Bryant hasn't been online since mid-October; @Stephano Borini is about in the same boat; @Numenetics hasn't been around since early October. (I don't meant to target or pick on these users.)

We need to avoid voting and closing behavior like there was on How can I get past the WotC Profile Setup Wizard. The question was asked by a (at the time) new user with 1 rep. It had something like 2 or 3 close votes, an answer to "Contact WotC customer service with help on this one" and and not a single comment. No one was trying to reach out and make sure that user understood that they were welcome in the community, it was just their question which was not in the right place. All it took were a few comments to make sure that new user became an active participant in the community. Maybe they would have either way, but without the comments the response to that question was "go somewhere else" (Wizards support) and "this doesn't belong here" (closed).

Again, this is normally fine, but we're kind of desperate for users and activity.

Why aren't more or us investing energy into that sort of welcoming community energy instead of fretting over voting trends?