Could/should we work this into our help center?

Question

Catija said something in a comment yesterday that really struck me as something we could all stand to keep in mind:

You don't have to vote on every question and answer posted here. When you downvote because something makes you uncomfortable, you are hurting the person who has asked the question... they already admit in the question that the subject is somewhat taboo. When you judge them in your voting rather than judging the question quality or topicality itself, you're signaling, in another place, that they are not welcome. The SE I love is not that sort of place

She later removed the comment because the comments that sparked it were removed, but I think it's a message worth keeping perhaps even working it in to our help center text somehow.

I know we generally don't try to tell people how to vote, but perhaps we could keep the core message, but reword it as a message about how to judge posts more generally.

What do you all think?

If you think it's a message we want to put in the help center how should it be worded?

If you think it shouldn't be in the help center, why not?

Answer 1

I don't have much of an opinion on this, beyond the feeling that it is too trite to be effective; the help center already contains extensive guidance on voting, as does the UI itself - if someone's going out of their way to vote in a manner contrary to these guidelines, chances are they either feel they have a good reason to or are oblivious to any guidance.

...But that doesn't mean y'all shouldn't be on the lookout for this and take steps to mitigate it. It just means you shouldn't waste your time squirreling away more proscriptive guidance.

I happened to be compiling a list of resources for a moderator on one of our religion-focused sites who is dealing with a similar problem. And it struck me that, although this site does not explicitly purport to address questions on any particular system of beliefs, it does most certainly attract a large number of participants from a diverse set of backgrounds, cultures, and belief systems... Who are all expected to turn their knowledge of these same into answers, in spite of the fact that they're extremely likely to contradict one another in different contexts (or perhaps even in a single context!) This is precisely the problem we've seen on sites dedicated to Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc. where different sects are both on-topic but yet at odds with one another.

With that in mind, here are some discussions from yesteryear that y'all might find useful as you attempt to solve these problems here:

• Is it acceptable to “vote your convictions” on Christianity.SE?

• What should we do about matching the viewpoints of askers and answerers?

• Christianity.SE vs. Survivor

• Please vote based on quality

• Why Sectarianism is Ruining Your Site

This is not a short list nor a quick one to read, because this is not an easy problem that can be solved with simple measures. But for those of you building this site, I believe it is worth your while to become familiar with the challenges that've faced those who walked this road before.

Answer 2

It is the common sense approach advocated all over Stack Exchange:

downvote if the question/answer is weak or shows lack of research/ effort, or downvote to highlight a serious factual or logical defect.

It is standard practice to spell out what is expected from an upvote/downvote -- in fact we do already mention in the help topic related to voting that

Voting up a question or answer signals to the rest of the community that a post is interesting, well-researched, and useful, while voting down a post signals the opposite: that the post contains wrong information, is poorly researched, or fails to communicate information.

In addition, as noted by Community Manager @Shog9 in a comment here, the help page for the downvote privilege already covers the intended purpose of downvotes pretty thoroughly and goes out of its way to advocate restraint, but (he adds) whether anyone reads it is debatable.

In fact, new members may not often read that page, nor have enough exposure to SE culture yet to understand the implications of downvoting; and as for those who do know their DV's, even experienced members can too often be tempted to cast opinion-based downvotes. So there can be no harm and only good in specifying at the 'downvote' action point, what is and what is not expected from a downvote, by adding a popup reminder such as

downvotes are meant to highlight defects in the post such as lack of research/effort or a serious fault of logic. Please do not use downvotes to express your personal disagreement with (or disapproval of) the author or the content of the post.

I know this might only be possible to address at the network level, but such a reminder should ideally be incorporated as a popup message that appears when someone presses the downvote button. The system can then ask you to confirm the downvote, or else the user should be allowed 2 minutes to reverse their downvote at their own discretion, if they realise that they actually downvoted for the wrong reason.

However, the way that's presented should not make it more laborious for a user to cast a downvote: I am sure SE will not implement any feature that tends to discourage/ complicate/ inhibit downvoting in general, because downvoting is as integral as upvoting to how the system evaluates, ranks and displays posts on the basis of relevance, accuracy and quality.