Timeline for If more users could vote, would they engage more? Testing 1 reputation voting on some sites
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
15 events
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| Oct 2, 2023 at 15:23 | comment | added | Catija StaffMod | Sorry, @Michael, my query was for the top 1000, so when I got to 999 or 1000, whichever it shows last, only three up or five downvotes had been cast on those posts. My point being, while a small number of posts may see an outsized number of votes, on a site with over 3 million posts, only 1000 of the posts saw 3 or 5 anon/low rep votes in the last month. If we assume (possibly incorrectly) that the anon users are unlikely to join merely to vote on a single post, then the number of those vote attempts that become real votes would be lower. | |
| Oct 1, 2023 at 16:17 | comment | added | Shog9 | The skew between up and down on SO isn't so severe... but the gap has closed over the years since I first started paying attention. If memory serves, it tracks pretty closely with the vote patterns for very high reputation users, which suggests a natural tendency toward folks being more motivated to report disappointment than satisfaction, in keeping with patterns seen in other public review systems. | |
| Sep 30, 2023 at 8:27 | comment | added | Catija StaffMod | I did some poking around to see which posts are getting the most up/down feedback attempts. This is covered in the 10k tools but it doesn't actually show how much feedback was given that month. I looked at the posts with the 1000 most up and down on Math. There were some very odd extreme cases where questions received over 50 "downvotes" in the last month (7 posts), by the time the 1000 was rounded out, they were down to 5. "Upvotes" were lower, only 3 above 50 and down to 3 by 1000. This indicates to me that, for the most part, these vote attempts are spread around. | |
| Sep 29, 2023 at 23:39 | comment | added | Jon Ericson | @TylerH: To be clear, those sentences aren't about people who would be newly enfranchised. Registered users who don't have enough reputation to vote currently are still slightly more likely to downvote than upvote in this sample. That's in sharp contrast to current voters who are far more likely to upvote than downvote. I suspect the downvote penalty plays some role, but it's possible people will change their voting habits when the vote count. | |
| Sep 29, 2023 at 22:14 | history | edited | TylerH | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Sep 29, 2023 at 22:13 | comment | added | TylerH | "we can see that visitors click the downvote arrow almost as many times in a day as voters upvote. People who find posts via Google, are much less inclined to select the up arrow in this sample." That's a very surprising statistic, but one that greatly assuages my concerns here. | |
| Sep 29, 2023 at 22:09 | history | edited | TylerH | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Sep 29, 2023 at 21:48 | comment | added | Catija StaffMod | It's worth saying that what @starball is questioning is why we're not taking the data directly as a prediction of the impact of this change and wanting to test it. I'd personally stop trying to vote if I knew I couldn't, so if that's the case for many users, a popup that their votes are counted now would hopefully lead them to start voting again. | |
| Sep 29, 2023 at 21:40 | comment | added | Catija StaffMod | I appreciate the work you've done to investigate this! I'm also really interested in understanding whether we'd see a big change in participation with this change. I do think it's interesting how many more anonymous downvotes Math gets than up! I noticed that a few months ago. Since I didn't look into which posts are getting downvoted (which would be really interesting!), I'm not sure whether those downvotes are "appropriate", so maybe I'll see if there are any specific posts seeing >5 downvotes from anon users and then see what the current score on those posts is. | |
| Sep 29, 2023 at 21:33 | comment | added | Catija StaffMod | @starball While I may not have mentioned it in my post, we'd also be changing the copy in the register modal shown when someone who's not logged in attempts to vote. | |
| Sep 29, 2023 at 20:49 | comment | added | starball Mod | also, there's the fact that if you try to vote without an account, a popup appears that you need X reputation to vote up/down and makes no mention of anonymous feedback, and says: "Join Stack Overflow to start earning reputation and unlocking new privileges like voting and commenting.". Which I think can lead to people not even trying to vote if they make an account until they get the vote privilege and get the privilege notification. | |
| Sep 29, 2023 at 20:44 | comment | added | Jon Ericson | @starball: That would be interesting to know! I don't have access to detailed voting data, but I suspect someone could get some idea of what would happen based on voting patterns after people get the voting privilege from 1) organic activity on the site or 2) the association bonus. | |
| Sep 29, 2023 at 19:41 | history | edited | starballMod | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
I don't think those rows are necessary to show here
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| Sep 29, 2023 at 19:37 | comment | added | starball Mod | I have theorized that many people currently don't vote as actively as they would because when they try to vote, they are told that their votes don't have "full effect". Like "what's the point if it doesn't count?". see also Why do I forget to upvote useful questions and solutions?. If that theory holds water, then your "won't make much difference" may not hold true as people gain "real" voting privileges. | |
| Sep 29, 2023 at 19:18 | history | answered | Jon Ericson | CC BY-SA 4.0 |