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I see this questions' been asked before, but in a different tone and not with very satisfactory answers. Every day I scroll through the iPhone-tagged questions to find reams of -1 or -2 questions, with no comment provided that would give any help to the person asking the question.

It just discourages those users from asking.

Now I know voting is supposed to be anonymous, but there's no reason why, if you are downvoting a question with 0 votes, you could not be prompted to provide a reason which would be posted anonymously - or even left so it was only viewable to moderators/high-rep people.

Voting down for no reason at all isn't vandalism or spiteful, but it's very, very unhelpful and it's not going to encourage new users to keep using SO.

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5 Answers 5

up vote 11 down vote accepted

To be honest, I've probably accounted for many of those downvotes without comment in the [iphone] tag. At first, I left comments for every one of the questions I voted down, in an effort to try to help people write better questions. However, as of late there have been more and more bad questions being written and I just don't have the energy to leave a comment for every single question clarifying what's wrong with them. I found that very few of the people learned anything from the remarks I left. Some of the askers even responded negatively to them.

In cases where there is a good question, but poor phrasing or broken English, I edit the question itself to clean it up. We don't want to discourage those who actually try to use the site correctly, but aren't proficient in English. This is why I like the idea of flagging questions that just need a little editing.

I try to be polite and patient with people, but there are so many duplicated questions that could have been found with simple searches, "do my work for me" questions, "what is wrong with this code that is only applicable to my particular case" ones, and just plain unintelligible questions that sometimes I simply choose to vote them down and quickly move on.

Now that downvotes are used as a metric to help block undesirable users, we even have an incentive to vote down just plain bad questions to prevent users from abusing the system. Negative votes can also motivate people to close and / or delete these bad questions so that we can remove them from the system.

The popularity of the iPhone and iPad, combined with how helpful the Stack Overflow community is, have driven a lot of help vampires here (as Shog9 notes), along with people looking to get rich quick writing iPhone applications without putting in any effort. As SO appears at the top of more and more Google searches for programming problems, this will only get worse.

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It just discourages those users from asking.

Well, it doesn't just do that. It also provides a cue to other users that, hey, this question sucks. Which is important: there are a lot of questions asked on SO, and getting hung up reading the lousy ones can discourage users from answering.

But yeah, it can also discourage users from asking. Which, as Aarobot notes, isn't necessarily a bad thing: if your questions are persistently down-voted, you're probably doing something wrong. You'd be better off taking a break, reading other questions, learning what sort of questions are appropriate for the site and how best to ask them.

In fact, if you regularly ask down-voted questions, the system itself will prevent you from asking more of them. So if you take the hint early, that's just better for everyone...

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Hover your mouse over the downvote button. The text says "This question is unclear or not useful." That's the implicit explanation for a downvote if no comment is left.

Also, I just scrolled through the newest 250 questions tagged [iphone] and only 3 of them were downvoted. Are people maybe asking a lot of non-programming questions about using their iPhones that are subsequently getting closed and deleted?

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I'm upvoting, not because I think it would be useful to add anonymous comments, but because I agree with the initial premise, that downvoting without comments is a good way to chase newcomers.

I don't think it's a question of anonymity, so much as time. A lot of questions are just "hey, fix that for me", "give me the codez", and everyone's favourite, "why doesn't this work" without any code. It is even likelier that new, popular technologies (such as the iPhone) will garner more questions that way. You don't see that many downvotes on the [assembler] tag, I'm certain.

I'd like to submit a possible "downvote auto-comment" idea. I'm afraid it would create too much "noise", but essentially, on downvoting, a short (this is key) list of choices as to the likeliest explanation (i.e a poll). Choices/reasons could be:

  • Question is unclear
  • Question is irrelevant
  • User accept rate is too low

I'd be surprised if anyone ever chose that last one, but I suspect it's truly happening.

EDIT:

At 2000 rep, you get to turn that sucker off! How's that? :)

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Good questions => + votes

Bad questions => - votes

Neither => 0 vote

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