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Comments on I cannot understand the meaning of some downvotes
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I cannot understand the meaning of some downvotes
In my opinion, downvoting some kinds of posts is meaningless.
For example, why should anyone downvote a bug report, like this post? If someone has the same problem, they can upvote the bug report; otherwise, they can skip it. Quite the contrary, I think bug report posts should be heavily upvoted to encourage other users to report bugs of the system.
Another example, why should anyone downvote a community proposal, like this post? If someone is interested in contributing to such a community, they can upvote the proposal; otherwise, they can skip it. Now, if I dislike a subject (or do not like to contribute to a proposed community) and see that there is some proposal covering the subject, then I should downvote the proposal?!
Votes on meta supposedly means "agree/don't agree". Which may make sense in some cases, not so much in other cases. I …
3y ago
In an ideal world, bug reports and support requests would be a separate stream from discussions and feature requests. W …
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why should anyone downvote a community proposal, like this post? Because they think it's a flawed proposal. That re …
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Post
Votes on meta supposedly means "agree/don't agree". Which may make sense in some cases, not so much in other cases.
I have argued many times on the Codidact forums/meta that using the same Q&A meta model as SE should be avoided. It is a model that we know is ill-suited both for discussion and support. Specifically:
- Discussions are hard to follow unless there are collapsible discussion threads (like Reddit etc). The Q&A format and then a bunch of comments is poorly suited particularly for broad discussions.
- It doesn't make much sense to vote on bug reports. Either something is a bug or it isn't, only the devs can tell.
- It doesn't make much sense to vote on support requests. You can't agree or disagree with a support request. "No, I don't agree that you are having this problem" doesn't make sense.
- Support requests are by their very nature highly likely to be duplicates. Closing them as such isn't very helpful - if someone needs help, help them. None except those actually planning to help need to interact with a support request. The rest should ignore such posts.
- The Q&A model makes it very hard to find relevant policies, FAQs and community consensus. It does in fact make it hard to find things in general, not only on meta. Mixing discussions, support requests and bug reports into one single mess doesn't exactly help.
- Voting on people's ideas for new features or opinions means needless drama and a negative atmosphere. Everyone should be free to express their opinion without fearing to get down-voted into meta-hell.
- On that note, voting also tend to lead to bandwagon/sheep behavior, where users stop thinking of what they want themselves and just follow everyone else.
- When there is an actual need for voting or polls, then invoke a poll. Doesn't even have to be on this site, there's plenty of free external poll sites.
The reason SO went with Q&A format for meta was because that in the early days, they had some irrational belief that the Q&A model was the answer to every problem in the world. 10 years of toxic SO.meta discussions later, we know that it was a design mistake. One we do not need to repeat.
To improve things short term, we could at least have different categories for discussions, feature requests, support requests and bug reports. In the long term, I believe we need an entirely different format for the metas.
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