Could we have better help for those whose content has been (heavily) downvoted?
I often see people plaintively saying something like: “My comment has been heavily downvoted, but I have no idea why!” Can the forum be more helpful for this scenario?
Not sure what the best solution is, but here’s an idea:
if someone’s comment/post has been downvoted enough for it to have net negative status, the UI allows the user to ask for feedback (e.g. it’s an option when you click on the three dots on the top right hand side)
if they ask for feedback, the forum contacts all those who downvoted it and also some high-karma people and links to the content and asks for feedback (which they don’t have to give, and which would be anonymous)
The feature could perhaps incorporate additional features
to increase the probability that people provide feedback, they could be remunerated (this could an alternative use for the Forum prize money, if it was decided that forum prizes didn’t incentivise people more than the existing karma system) (perhaps there would need to be some thought given to avoiding the perverse incentive for people to give downvotes too liberally)
the system could incorporate some mechanism to make sure that users don’t overuse/abuse this feature (e.g. perhaps the user has to write out and submit to the forum what they will do differently in the future before they are allowed to use the feature again)
I think this could be more useful for people who are slightly downvoted, or whose posts just don’t get much attention. I remember a few recent highly-downvoted posts and comments (below −10 or so), and all of them seem to have well-written feedback; sometimes more thought was put into the feedback than the original post (not necessarily a bad thing, but going even further could be a massive waste of energy).
People who provide feedback also have to want to engage. On Stack Exchange, closing a question requires a reason, but mods and high-rep users are known to close poorly-written questions for vague reasons without providing much feedback. An even worse failure mode I see is if users are disincentivized from downvoting because they don’t want to be added to the feedback list.
I also don’t know what the best solution is, or if the best solution is a codebase change (as opposed to just a norm that you should avoid silently downvoting things if you can, unless feedback you agree with is already there).
But I agree this is a problem: downvoting silently achieves the function of allowing the forum to sort and filter content, but fails the function of allowing users to learn and get better.
Could we have better help for those whose content has been (heavily) downvoted?
I often see people plaintively saying something like: “My comment has been heavily downvoted, but I have no idea why!” Can the forum be more helpful for this scenario?
Not sure what the best solution is, but here’s an idea:
if someone’s comment/post has been downvoted enough for it to have net negative status, the UI allows the user to ask for feedback (e.g. it’s an option when you click on the three dots on the top right hand side)
if they ask for feedback, the forum contacts all those who downvoted it and also some high-karma people and links to the content and asks for feedback (which they don’t have to give, and which would be anonymous)
The feature could perhaps incorporate additional features
to increase the probability that people provide feedback, they could be remunerated (this could an alternative use for the Forum prize money, if it was decided that forum prizes didn’t incentivise people more than the existing karma system) (perhaps there would need to be some thought given to avoiding the perverse incentive for people to give downvotes too liberally)
the system could incorporate some mechanism to make sure that users don’t overuse/abuse this feature (e.g. perhaps the user has to write out and submit to the forum what they will do differently in the future before they are allowed to use the feature again)
I think this could be more useful for people who are slightly downvoted, or whose posts just don’t get much attention. I remember a few recent highly-downvoted posts and comments (below −10 or so), and all of them seem to have well-written feedback; sometimes more thought was put into the feedback than the original post (not necessarily a bad thing, but going even further could be a massive waste of energy).
People who provide feedback also have to want to engage. On Stack Exchange, closing a question requires a reason, but mods and high-rep users are known to close poorly-written questions for vague reasons without providing much feedback. An even worse failure mode I see is if users are disincentivized from downvoting because they don’t want to be added to the feedback list.
I also don’t know what the best solution is, or if the best solution is a codebase change (as opposed to just a norm that you should avoid silently downvoting things if you can, unless feedback you agree with is already there).
But I agree this is a problem: downvoting silently achieves the function of allowing the forum to sort and filter content, but fails the function of allowing users to learn and get better.