I am in a conundrum. I am currently staring a poor question in the face, as I often find myself doing. I want to downvote it, and in fact I did, but then I quickly undid my downvote. I realized that, more often than not, a question of this quality is likely to receive a pity upvote if the score is negative, and my downvote would actually be giving the OP rep. So I’m going to wait a while, and if the question gets an upvote, I will downvote then.

This all seems incredibly silly.

@AlexisKing it is. Just downvote - statistically, the question will get no other votes.

@Shog9 Low traffic tag. I have personally observed this behavior many, many times.

sure

Well, it’s impossible to prove, given that I can’t try both scenarios and see what would happen in each case. ;)

This tag is low traffic enough to get ~10 questions per day, so if I only looked at the second page, I would never get to answer any questions.

@AlexisKing what tag?

@zaq I like answering questions. I find it fun. ;)

@Shog9 scheme OR racket

a'ight... Let's look at scheme. Quick'n'dirty query, probably bugs. For questions posted in the past 365 days...

VoteTypeId First vote Then upvoted Then downvoted
---------- ---------- ------------ --------------
2          425        177          53
3          186        66           85

When the first vote was an upvote (type #2), 177 of 425 were upvoted, and 53 of 425 were downvoted (some were probably up- and down-voted... quick'n'dirty, remember?)

When the first vote was a downvote (type #3), 66 of 186 were upvoted, 85 were downvoted.

This includes deleted questions... And deleted votes

A good chunk of questions (but less than half) never got any votes - so ignoring those

I’m not saying this happens for most questions. But this is specifically the sort of question that is in the awkward in between. (And I’ve monitored these tags almost every day for probably over a year and a half now, so those numbers seem reasonable to me.)

Don't get me wrong, I've seen sympathy votes plenty of times

But it's hard to deny that the bigger problem - even in small tags - is questions that never get ANY votes

Most of the questions we get in these tags are either awful or extremely meh. The meh questions don’t seem worth a downvote, but they’re usually not worthy of an upvote, either.

Many of those meh questions are clearly homework questions, but they’re not gimme-teh-codez so people can at least give some form of ethical help.

@zaq Most questions in these tags get answered because of the relatively low questions-to-answerers ratio.

Many of those answers get upvotes, even if the questions do not.

I don’t think teaching people Java or Python as their first programming language is necessarily a great idea, but I admit I think SICP is a terrible introductory text, too.

But for some of these students this isn’t an introductory course, anyway. Maybe it’s a functional programming course. Some of these people are competent programmers who don’t understand how to write recursive or immutable algorithms because they didn’t learn them when they wrote Java.

Hi! :)

Nope, just Master.

Maybe one day.

@zaq Finally remembered the name for this after thinking about it for an hour. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path

Interesting how Bhargav pulled ahead as India woke up, and stayed ahead, while 3rd and 4th place holders seem to be pulling neck and neck. soprimaries.charcoal-se.org/vote_counts/graph

I was hoping Andy would place higher too.

Well, if we get the top five again (and we place the same for the general election), Andy will be in. I'd be ok with that.