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Are downvotes needed?
Being on the receiving end of a downvote is not a good experience 99.9% of the time. The countless flavors of downvote abuse are notorious. Even for a third party, there is little value in the satisfaction of seeing an answer they dislike thoroughly downvoted, because they'd really rather not see it all. With this being such a negative feature, it must surely have some great benefit to overcome that, right?
The classic justification is of course that we need downvotes to flag bad posts, so that users can skip, filter or sort them to the last page, and moderators can prioritize them. Except we already have a "flag" action which is much more direct and logical.
Another idea was that downvotes encourage users to improve. At this point, I think this has become a ridiculous canard. Drive by downvoting has a way of going rampant, and there's no real way to stop it. But let's be naive: If downvoters actually left a comment constructive criticism, what does that do that a comment with no downvote doesn't? In fact, if you've left a constructive comment, adding a downvote serves only to irritate the victim and make it less likely that they will listen to the criticism.
Further, downvoted posts are not left for posterity to serve as an example. They are usually deleted. So if the question is to be deleted anyway, why bother downvoting it? It seems to be a superfluous addition to a normal housekeeping task, that only generates animosity and detracts from the user experience.
What is the actual justification for having downvotes?
2 answers
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The classic justification is of course that we need downvotes to flag bad posts, so that users can skip, filter or sort them to the last page, and moderators can prioritize them. Except we already have a "flag" action which is much more direct and logical.
How should the flag action work to sort posts? Say you disagree with an answer here on Meta. So you flag it to disagree. Now what should the moderator do? Manually count the number of flags thrown on the post and manually reorder the answers accordingly? That just sounds like downvotes with extra steps.
Delete the post? That is much too extreme, especially if it doesn't violate any rules.
You may say that downvoted posts are often deleted, and yes, purely downvoted posts often are, but that doesn't take into account posts with mixed votes, such as if it has say, 10 upvotes and 3 downvotes. This is still a generally useful answer by community voting consensus, but we would probably want to order it below say a post with 8 upvotes and no downvotes.
Without downvotes, we would have 10 upvotes to 8 upvotes. We would have a similar problem to reputation, where by simple virtue of existing longer, it accumulates more points and is higher rated, despite the ratio of people who find it helpful being different.
There is a difference between a flag ("this requires action that only a moderator can take") and a downvote, which expresses an opinion about the post that the community can decide how to respond to.
There may be several reasons for and against having downvotes. This answer just expresses one reason for.
Downvotes drive discussion
Prompting comments
I often see posts with one or more downvotes and no comments to explain why. My response is generally to add a comment. That may be a comment to express that I see no reason for the downvotes, or it may be a comment to explain anything about the post that I think could be improved.
In both cases there is now information expressed on the post that I would have been unlikely to have expressed if there were no downvotes. The people who downvoted added no content, but they prompted discussion which does add content.
Hiding downvoters
The anonymity of downvotes makes it easy to add one without having to think or justify it. This means that a person who notices that a post is problematic can indicate this with no need to put aside time and effort for explaining. Without this anonymity, some downvotes would not be cast, resulting in less information being added to the site.
Making downvotes count
I would encourage everyone to add comments to downvoted posts to explain what can be improved, even when that seems obvious. What is obvious differs widely between different people.
This is not a request for downvoters to add comments. I highly value the ability of downvoters to do so anonymously without leaving a comment. This is a request for other members of the community to add comments wherever they see downvotes.
I see this as teamwork. One person highlights that a post needs improvement, and another person responds by explaining what can be improved. Splitting this job between more people means that posts that might otherwise get ignored instead get improved.
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