Timeline for answer to A Second Chance: Rework the Reopen System by Jon Ericson
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
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20 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| May 2, 2018 at 16:16 | comment | added | user4639281 | @Felix i am in no way denying that the most common outcome you see is for a question to be of both low quality and low topicality. That does not change the fact that the two systems are separate, serve different purposes, should be evaluated separately, and should not be conflated. Down votes are used to indicate quality while close votes are used to indicate topicality. | |
| May 2, 2018 at 16:10 | comment | added | user2371524 | @TinyGiant well, ask others about their experience if you must. Denying this correlation is just silly, period. | |
| May 2, 2018 at 16:08 | comment | added | user4639281 | @Felix I am in no way implying that anyone doesn't know anything. The fact is that close votes and down votes are separate systems which serve different purpose, and they should be evaluated separately regardless of how common a specific outcome is. You are identifying the most common outcome in your experience anecdotally, which is fine. The problem is that you are using the existence of the most common outcome as proof of a correlation, where there is in fact no correlation. It just happens to be that that is the most common outcome in your experience (anecdotally), period. | |
| May 2, 2018 at 15:57 | comment | added | user2371524 | @TinyGiant you just refuse to understand what I'm writing. The real-world experience is, at least for me, that questions to be closed are most of the time bad quality and deserve a downvote. That's not because voters can't tell the difference, like you're implying here. You can't "reduce the odds of downvotes with close votes" without ... well, having better questions. | |
| May 2, 2018 at 15:53 | comment | added | user4639281 | @Felix you're using many different sweeping terms here: first you say that if you are voting to close a question, It is lacking quality (this implies a direct correlation), then you say it is very rare to see a question worth closing that isn't low quality, then you say most questions you vote to close are low quality. Yet you have provided no data to support your claim which is largely irrelevant to the fact that close votes and down votes are separate, and they should be evaluated separately regardless of how common a specific outcome is. They are different and should not be conflated. | |
| May 2, 2018 at 15:49 | comment | added | user2371524 | @TinyGiant I never said these don't exist. But either you're seeing a different reality than me or it's wishful thinking -- what I see every time I look at SO is that most questions to be closed are, indeed, low quality. | |
| May 2, 2018 at 15:47 | comment | added | user4639281 | A question can be of reasonable quality while lacking clarity. A debugging question question can be completely well-formed but be missing a vital line of code necessary to diagnose the issue. In these cases closure is beneficial because it prevents "guess" answers that become irrelevant noise once the question is clarified. Such questions are not lacking in quality, but rather clarity. @Felix | |
| May 2, 2018 at 15:41 | comment | added | user2371524 | @TinyGiant I don't know what tags you're looking at, but "unclear what you're asking" is clearly a problem with the question quality, as welll as is "no MCVE". For the other "off-topic" reasons, it is very rare to find a good question that should be closed anyways, and of course, I don't downvote such a question. But it is the standard case that questions to be closed are low quality. | |
| May 2, 2018 at 15:39 | comment | added | user4639281 | @FelixPalmen I've never closed a question as being very low quality. As far as I know that is not a close reason. I downvote low quality content, and vote to close off-topic questions. There is no correlation between topicality and quality, even if it may be common for off-topic questions to be low quality. You assert: "The vote should just be a quality indicator and if you are voting to close a question, it is lacking quality.", which is false given that close votes are not inherently quality indicators, but rather topicality indicators. | |
| May 2, 2018 at 15:32 | comment | added | user2371524 | @TinyGiant note I wrote often. Of course there are such cases, but often, the question should be closed because it's very low quality, and that deserves a downvote. | |
| May 2, 2018 at 15:04 | comment | added | user4639281 | @Felix it is entirely possible to have a well written, interesting question that is off-topic for the site for one reason or another. There are many situations where a question should be closed but doesn't warrant a downvote. The two voting systems serve different purposes and should not be conflated. | |
| May 2, 2018 at 11:13 | comment | added | user2371524 | I think it often makes a lot of sense to also downvote when voting to close. The vote should just be a quality indicator and if you are voting to close a question, it is lacking quality. The problem lies somewhere else, IMHO: It just doesn't happen often enough, that a vote on a question is reconsidered after it was edited. Maybe there could be a very simple feature to help improve on that: Have some way to see what posts you already voted on were modified after your latest vote. | |
| May 1, 2018 at 21:11 | comment | added | user6655984 | On a site where close votes take forever to take effect (and often expire unreviewed), downvotes remain the only indicator of poor quality that one can use to filter the stream. | |
| May 1, 2018 at 20:54 | comment | added | Jon Ericson StaffMod | @NicolBolas: Good point. If the question is closed, edited and reopened, those signposts are potentially outdated. | |
| May 1, 2018 at 20:52 | comment | added | Jon Ericson StaffMod | @bro: It's helpful to look at old problems with different lenses. I think answer downvotes make a ton of sense: they help sort the page. But on questions, especially on a site that gets thousands a day, downvotes only really serve to cost the asker reputation and feed systems to block them from asking. Those are useful effects, to be sure, but it's hard to argue they target content rather than the user unless people retract votes after edits. Anyway, I'm still thinking about the idea. | |
| May 1, 2018 at 19:42 | comment | added | Nicol Bolas | "After serving a suspension, accounts are returned to normal." That's completely different. You don't remove the votes of a suspended account. You never actually remove the reputation of a suspended account. You simply show their rep as "1". | |
| May 1, 2018 at 19:41 | comment | added | Nicol Bolas | @Jon: "Downvotes on questions communicate . . . honestly, I have a hard time expressing what they should communicate." They communicate that the post is lacking in quality. This is not for the person making the post, but for the following people wondering about its quality. | |
| May 1, 2018 at 19:31 | comment | added | user6655984 | "wouldn't that be a good reason to close instead" ... I haven't seen this position from Community Team yet. Should Stack Overflow (and Stack Exchange in general) be awarding “A”s for Effort?. It's reasonable to downvote a "please send the codes" question and not vote to close: downvoting enables automatic deletion if there is no answer, but also allows for an answer to be given, which after all may prove to be useful code. | |
| May 1, 2018 at 19:06 | comment | added | BoltClock Mod | "The tooltip mentions lack of 'research effort', but wouldn't that be a good reason to close instead?" As a duplicate maybe (see also). But not other reasons, unless lack of research effort is the reason the question was off-topic to begin with. | |
| May 1, 2018 at 19:04 | history | answered | Jon EricsonStaffMod | CC BY-SA 3.0 |