oh, I disagree with Cody all the time :P (he doesn't like Python that much)

I also pretty much agree with him most of the time when it comes to Stack Policy though - so I guess it depends on the subject :)

@Spevacus "Downvotes bad" "Downvoters bad" "Downvoter haz some psychological malfunction that makes him want to terrorize other people's livelihood" "I KNEW SO would turn like this" "I miss the old days when people were nice and did each other's homew . . . favors"

"require a comment with a downvote" "require a downvote with a comment" "require a comment for upvotes" "require a comment for viewing and not voting" (true story) "only the first downvoter needs to comment" "downvoters should not be anonymous and well within sniper rifle range" "I got 2 whole downvotes and I demand them reversed"

Any I missed?

@Tinkeringbell BTW: Your country question was answered with a one star winner o{O

you know if they were changing the downvote/upvote tooltips - why not change the Meta (this & site metas) ones first? - where voting actually is different

^^^ within arm's reach

@M.A.R. "downvoters should not be anonymous and well within sniper rifle range" Oh my gosh hahaha. That's excellent.

@M.A.R. "I am being serial downvoted because all my questions are closed"

@LinkBerest Well "mod hate me" is another story altogether

ah, yes. Always fun to answer those with: "A mod didn't do anything - like 15-20 users did"

I love the site meta questions where the OP complains "These moderators closed my question", where none of the close-voters are diamond mods.

^ yeah, that :)

Curious... on a main site, what are reasons you've used to downvote a post? Bonus points, separate responses for Questions vs Answers.

"lack of research", "just a homework question (literally copied from homework)", "shows no effort", etc... all along that vein (on Meta: "I disagree")

Based off of a false premise

Answers on Main: "STOP USING SQL INJECTION SUSCEPTIBLE METHODS!" <- or anything else which means "this answer is wrong"

^ those type of answers usually end up with positive scores and "I" get called a jerk in comments/meta because I pointed out the error and downvoted

There was one who train that nested three levels at least. "Why my questions on main getting downvoted?" "Why my meta post getting downvoted" "Why my meta post about getting downvoted getting downvoted"

Maybe more than one

I downvote when it seems like not even an attempt was made to find the answer per google

That's oddly easy to tell most of the time

when I can type the question title into google verbatim and the clearly explained answer with examples is in the first 3 results that usually gets a thumbs down from me

Hwo can i lern c+ fast pls exam on mondya

Oooh, a day that doesn't end with a y.

I dont necessarily downvote questions that are poorly written or incomplete, closing is there for that. If it is a reasonably novel problem and it seems like the first action was not to just ask and have someone else do your googling then it's not really downvote worthy

if u are and expert pls anser

same for answers an answer needs to be more then wrong to get a downvote, like dangerously wrong or obviously not tested / thought through

i need dis more then anyhting

I mostly inhabit SO & some science sites. Downvotes on questions: lack of research, which often includes basic erroneous assumptions. Also, blatant no-effort homework dumps.

I click on my avatar but I don't see that.

I call fake.

Answers: poor quality or downright wrong info, although I usually post a comment (with a supporting link) & wait for the author to fix their answer. If they can't or won't fix it, I may downvote . Sometimes, I fix it myself, or post a competing answer.

What folks need to understand is rating is and should be incompassionate

hmm... my downvote : upvote ratio seems to be 1:5 (yes, I know I should downvote more but I get sick of the drama)

Because trust in someone's skill is incompassionate

I can even understand when something is obviously a duplicate but the asker didn't know that because of technical terms not being known to them, chain googling until you hit the right term can be confusing and lengthy. But if i can copy paste the title into google

When you started seeing bad apps on Google Play get less than 4.0, then people are starting to get it.

tbh I used to be a lot more liberal giving out downvotes

Imagine reading a paper proving bananas are the de facto cure for COVID.

On Meta, unless I heavily disagree/it's blatantly off topic, I probably don't downvote. I probably should more often, though

I also downvote questions & answers if the English is so bad I can't figure out what they're trying to say. If I can figure it out, I may edit it to make it more comprehensible. I'm more strict on answers regarding clear language, since answers are more important for future readers.

And you encounter typos like "Hwo" "Knwo". Will you trust it?

That's what people complaining about downvotes need to understand

@PM2Ring I always feel a lil bad about that but sometimes. If it's a question I usually just close

Also maybe some statistics in that a single spiteful downvote out of nowhere does not cause immediate cardiac injury

its true though getting downvoted feels awful

it's the reason none of my colleagues have accounts here

Genau. "feels"

no reason to put that into quotations

Minor typos can often be blamed on people posting from their phone. But you should still read stuff after you submit it, just to be sure. Typos in code posted to SO or other coding related sites are much more serious. There's no excuse for posting code that you haven't tested by running or compiling it.

No, I'm quoting you

feelings are a part of us humans and having your feelings hurt is going to deter you from doing things

eh, I was pretty used to "voting" mechanics from reddit (upvote = "contributes to conversation", down = "does not contribute") but SO has a much stricter definition then even that so it can be hard to adjust

This holy grail manual of explaining why downvotes aren't that bad would exactly reduce the feels about it.

Getting downvoted into oblivion on Reddit feels much less impactful than getting downvoted into oblivion on SE.

If you're given a 100 kites to rate from bad to good to American bald eagle, You'd be hyped and 'personal' in the beginning, but by the middle, feelings have mostly gone away

@M.A.R. I do not think it would

I mean, even on reddit you get tons of post about being downvoted so I assume people really just do not understand moderation and the code review process (which matches my experience with leading/teaching junior developers)

You're looking for an objective way to rate kites, not a subjective way not to hurt the kite maker's feelings

All the reasons why we downvote are things that would make a normal person feel bad

"your post was poorly researched"

well that kinda feels bad having that said about something of yours, doesn't it?

Everything on that list can be interpreted as some form of social or parasocial rejection

Sure.

yep, but did it help you learn to research properly? (I've had way worse statements made about my research over the years)

So making it clear why we downvote will not necessarily reduce bad feelings about it.

Does the last downvote you got sting as much as the first? What changed?

@M.A.R. depends where :D

@JourneymanGeek -1

And I mean it to sting

and at the same time - "do research" is a massively important expectation to have of posters to SE

@LinkBerest That depends on the person. Some people take it as a challenge and face the negative feedback to spur themselves into improvement

@LinkBerest Well, you create blues

Happy and content people don't improve

Some people get discouraged and improve much better with positive or neutral feedback.

@M.A.R. on meta, most of my downvotes are people disagreeing or me making a point

true, one only improves through struggle

on SU? well I can be wrong

Not necessarily

BUT ON PETS.SE, IT'S LIFE AND DEATH

two of my coworkers would never improve this way you don't reach them by calling their code bad or their research bad. They're still good developers though, they just need a different learning method

@Magisch How many, compared to the former type?

no clue

a social psychologist, I am not

Me neither. I'm not sure I'd even trust a study on that

@Rob And that star was mine ;)

anecdotal evidence suggests it's a non negligible number

@Tinkeringbell Star-shaped mines sound impractical

@Magisch oh, I know that research (it certainly applies in a "school" setting) but it is every easy to take too far - to the point that you have students or junior devs who cannot function when told they are wrong. And making that work on a Q&A platform - I just don't see a way it couldn't become that

You voted for Somalia!

Researching properly can be hard, especially when you're new to the topic, so you don't yet know the proper keywords. But often that means you need to go back to the textbooks & learn the basics.

@Magisch Everything is a non-negligible number in 7 billion people

Even people that can touch their nose with their tongue

@LinkBerest Thats not where I'm going with this. It's true that downvotes always need to exist and the concept they represent needs to, too.

But it's worth investing in techniques that make it so that we have to downvote fewer posts by catching people making "downvote-able" mistakes earlier or before they make them.

@Rob Lol, that I didn't expect

Why is it a star?

ah, I am with the idea of adding some time of quality measurement or education besides up/down vote (esp. for those SQL Injection answers where just voting obviously doesn't work because they are everywhere)

@LinkBerest like?

Why is what, the flag or the rules of the contest?

@LinkBerest What I think, democracy is overrated

@Rob Would it help if I changed the word 'repost'? These questions often do have minor edits, or sometimes even bigger ones, but they're still 'the same question' (as in, the question itself is still POB, unclear or off-topic, and the improvements focused on 'wrong' things)

Someone with a very high tag score should have a bigger say, and own that responsibility

@JourneymanGeek For the education side? no idea - people don't click on things and tend to get banner blind quickly (again, I do think if they wanted to change the tooltips - they should start with the metas where there is a clear distinction in voting)

I'm not talking in terms of rep, that would get messy

@Spevacus On here?

@LinkBerest yup

@Tinkeringbell Yeah, I lost the link. I can try and hunt it down again, but I'm <10k so confirming will be a tad difficult.

that's part of the problem

votes are... simple

@Spevacus Easy peasy for me, don't worry. I'll hunt down my own ;)

any deeper feedback needs.. uh... wassname

the person to care

But if you want a convenient way of ridding yourself of SQL injection answers, you need people who are almost fully trusted to make a judgement on that leave a mark on the post with their votes

@Tinkeringbell Happy hunting!

@JourneymanGeek With the "other mechanism" : not thanks (which is not what I would mean) and we've tried comments but those get flagged and deleted (seriously) or lead to massive drama so I'm currently at - better ways for mods to handle comments then lets look at other metrics to add (or improve the tag "hammers")

@Spevacus Already got it. These things aren't a actually a hunt. More like playing hide and seek with a toddler.

Where they hide their head behind the couch but still have their butt sticking out.

Darn mod powers. >:(

They're lovely, at times :)

Looks like the OP might have realized, "Maaaaybe this was a bad idea" and self-deleted.

Here's hoping they responded to whatever mod message you, or another mod, sent.

I'd post a question about that but its been brought up a lot

@Spevacus There's a comment saying it should be on IPS Meta, and a comment saying they'd delete and repost. I guess the suspension came just in time ;)

@LinkBerest if it was easy, I'd have an answer :D

@Tinkeringbell Yeah that meta post was going to be a dumpster fire given the little bit of context I got from reading the question. I was mid-comment (saw the "Show 2 comments" link) when it disappeared before my eyes.

Oh well. Enjoy that aftermath a week from now. :)

@Spevacus I think, the community would've been able to handle closing that one as 'suitable to one site only' :P

@Tinkeringbell Nah I mean if it managed to make its way onto IPS meta.

@Spevacus Oh. Well, IPS meta isn't too bad at these things, if not provoked by trolls ;)

Besides it's been so quiet over there lately, I doubt enough people will turn up to make it a mess XD

@Tinkeringbell Most badass Tavern message of 2020 contender

I rarely star things

@JourneymanGeek es verdad, but then getting "thanks" and the rest. I just look hard at the priorities of SE and go - so we still haven't changed and 2 years of feedback isn't changing that - why add more ideas to be ignored?

@M.A.R. If you want me gone again, just say so. I just had dinner but I can probably go shower or something...

@LinkBerest then why bother complaining :D

@Tinkeringbell Changing that one word would help immensely, "repost" is essentially post it again; while the banner asks for a "new" question, doesn't exclude abandoning that subject and going for something else, or a total rewrite.

@Tinkeringbell this is still an option

cause someone asked, and "hope springs eternal" or at least dies a very slow death

@Mithical Chill Han Solo. It's only for you that my compliments are sarcastic

Mithical always shoots second.

I shoot?

Bad joke? Maybe.

At M.A.R. hopefully?

@Spevacus Let him try

@Rob Sure, but that says something about the post (it's recomposed + reposted?)

reposted in a recomposed form?

@Spevacus Nah, I just stick to kicking. And maybe occasionally freezing.

Makes things even more lengthy, ugh :P

More like

Ḽ̵̠̝̝̘̯ͬ̋̚͡E̟͇̅͐̊̅́̊ͨ͢͞T̵̨̟͈̱̺̩͕̟͐͊ ̻͍̪̼͇̗͗ͭ̌ͅH̶͕͎͈̄̓̅̎ͩI̴͍̟͚̋͗͂M̼̹͙̰̱̳̱̾͜͝ͅ ̂̈́̈́̃͋̿̋͘҉̴̰̜̼͍̞͔̖̙̳Ṫ̸̷̫̒͛̌̎R͂ͧ̑̿͐̚҉̞Y̸̵͚̗̤̬͖̫̗̫̫ͤ̑ͨͫ̔̔̓ͦ

@Mithical When was the last time the Tavern got a bit crazy? I probably haven't been around long enough to bear witness.

@JourneymanGeek gasp are you sure you can?

@Spevacus Unlike most other rooms, it's pretty sudden in The Tavern

@Spevacus *quick search* apparently the last time the room was put in timeout was... December.

@Rubiksmoose lots

and I have people to remind me :D

@Rubiksmoose You kidding, right? :p

@Mithical Sounds... about right, if my memory serves.

@JourneymanGeek I'm such a responsible person at all times

@Mithical What was it about?

Yes the "action" is to push the same button again, but the text ought to be wholly different; otherwise it's a minor edit - a major edit would invalidate votes or answers, and thus be revertable.

I mean, it's often not the regulars. A new user with a lot of fire jumps in and rants about mods or downvotes or life.

@Mithical well y'all are supposed to keep things from getting that far :D

doesn't matter

@M.A.R. Would I ever be less than utterly serious? ;-)

actually timeouts are for room wide... issues

@Rubiksmoose I was never a good Rubik solver

if its just one user we can bite their ankles kick em

or otherwise deal with the issue

Yeah that one was recent

Time outs are more exciting

@Rob I'll put the clarification in the first paragraph, everywhere after that where I use repost people can assume it's not a copy-paste of the original question ;)

It's like they want you to resume the fight after the magnificent hypnotizing countdown

Looking ...

@M.A.R. I think this cube is missing some pieces. I've been working on solving it for quite a while now.

@Rob Just a sec ;)

On the contrary, it's got extra pieces. Something to do with the antlers.

@Rubiksmoose I think those interestingly colored stains on the sides have something to do with it

XD so that's what the issue is!

@Rubiksmoose Your avatar... Was that something you made, or someone else made for you?

K, title too.

And is it because your name was Rubiksmoose, or was this the inspiration for your name?

He represents Elk Inc.

Darn capitalist. Down with the man.

Slowly making cases to sue all of us. Except maybe Journey, as they haven't found his weakness yet

@Spevacus The latter, and because of my name. I actually tried to make one in paint and failed utterly and somebody in RPG chat took mercy on me XD

Hehehe, nice.

@M.A.R. cheese. :D

I actually don't even remember what my avatar used to be...

What a . . . French dog.

@Rob Title?

Remove "repost" from the title, please.

@Rob Okay. But only because you're technically correct in that the suggestion says to post a new one, not repost a recomposed old one ;)

@M.A.R. it was still during the dumpster fire clean-up so you can assume it had something to do with that

I am happy with the title, though not about the idea to remove it :)

@Rob Works for me ;) Not everyone can be happy with everything :)

Have you seen people actually post good, new version of a closed question?

Once, maybe, on SO.

@Tinkeringbell I don't think I have. I was just trying to think about that.

Perhaps those posts are hidden in the nebulous data I couldn't find anywhere ;)

@Tinkeringbell That would take some research, I'd look on Physics.SE; which would increase the amount of time I'd need to invest.

used to see that (rarely but still it happened) with Sandbox - more often they would either leave it closed because they worked it out or edit the question to fit the model and it would be re-opened

RPG is pretty good at going back and adjusting voting on posts that get improved. I can't think of any cases specifically where posting a new question was any kind of good option to take.

@Rubiksmoose web.archive.org/web/20150909033237im_/https://www.gravatar.com/…

@LinkBerest Sandboxes are very nice, we've had a few uses for them on IPS too. But sometimes they come too late, and sometimes people can't post.

Won't be in the next couple of hours ... AFK

@Rob Don't worry. I was asking for anecdotes, mostly. No need to spend time hunting stuff down, though if you could make a compelling argument against the feature request that way, by all means go ahead :)

@Tinkeringbell and they require a certain level of participation from regulars (which is the problem we now have on WB)

Your current avatar looks much more like a Rubiksmoose.

@Mithical oooo! sneaky! I like this one much better. I already have to see that one too much in the mirror.

@LinkBerest True. IPS is very quiet too... we do have the Sandman post into our chat when there's a new one though, and I hope there's still a few regulars left that would help that way.

@Rubiksmoose As a casual reader... Yeah. RPG goes out of its way to help improve questions as much as possible. Maybe that's just the community that DND typically features, but the amount of closed questions/in danger of being closed questions that get improved and reopened are... way more than a lot of other sites, I'd like to think.

@Mithical ahhh yes. Of course I would have had a Nichijou avatar.

@Tinkeringbell our fallout is mostly due to fallout (most of our regulars, like myself, were also big supporters of M as you would expect on that site)

Expectation vs. reality

magnifique

@Spevacus That's nice to hear from someone "on the outside" for lack of a better term. I like to think we try...

@M.A.R. XD Believe it or not, 1000% better than my attempt.

@Rubiksmoose The head programmer at my workplace used to be a Pro-Tem mod over there when the site first launched, I guess. He said his views on what should be closed and what shouldn't were much more forgiving, IIRC. He's quite the DnD-er, though.

I... may have stalked his SE profiles a bit.

Sue me.

@Spevacus lol

That's cool though! I don't think I've ever met any regular user of RPG in meat-space...

I really wish I could get back into D&D (or Pathfinder really). Started to before all the closings then the group drifted apart again. Ah, well. One day my dwarf shall arise again

@LinkBerest Yeah, that's to be expected.

@LinkBerest :( Getting a group together and staying together is definitely one of the biggest challenges.

One thing though: if your group is down for lighter systems and short plays (or even one-shots) it is so much easier to get people together for one night to play something with no commitment and sometimes helps gets things rolling again :)

I'm lucky enough to have a campaign going right now. It's pretty awesome, but we lost 2 players (husband and wife) along the way because... they're... The way they want the game to be run wasn't how it was being run, and the expectations they had were a bit... Much.

@Rubiksmoose When I was in the Marines we had massive groups because it was easy to setup (everyone lived in barracks or housing) and we could continue when deployed with the short games (all your really need is some dice & pen & paper - we even sometimes just wrote some numbers on rocks for the dice)

@Spevacus ahhhhh yes. I've definitely been there before. Powergamers maybe? Or just expecting things to be more epic? Regardless, it is unfortunately common. :(

@LinkBerest That's awesome!

@Rubiksmoose The husband deliberately tried to metagame a lot (more intentional than unintentional, he's a DM as well). The wife... just... didn't care about giving the DM a backstory for her character, played a character that had a lot of quirks that derailed stuff in a not-so-entertaining way. It happens, we moved on. Not the harshest of feelings, I don't think.

@Spevacus Oof. Well it seems like at least everything ended for the better for both groups.

Yeah, when your stuck on base waiting for your next mission - anything that passes the time is a good thing so all the old card games came out (including all the Pen & Paper ones - which were extra fun because they were such an escape from reality)

@Mithical cheats

DMs can make really annoying players... (I know, I've been that guy)

@Mithical tsk tsk tsk, kids these days

Warhammer based games (we kinda altered them a lot to make it work in short time frames) were very popular as I recall

Back in my day screens were made of paper mache and you had to lick it to make an impression

@Mithical XD

@M.A.R. aren't you like 20

@M.A.R. You had screens? We just played outside...

@M.A.R. Get some extra fiber at least

@Rubiksmoose You vs the guy she told you not to worry about.

@Spevacus hahahah

@Tinkeringbell while you were hunting pokemons we were trying to get that dumb egg bombing bird drop the load right

Mine was orange flavored.

@Mithical Back in my day we respected our elders

@M.A.R. My love for pokemons only got to develop once I was in univerisity.

Mom hated 'those weird faces and screamy voices'

@Rob If I had to work with that for two days I would've called seasick

Orange is awesome but only the first two and a half seconds

yeah, it was the wargames (Slate has an interesting article on Soldiers playing Warhammer back in 2012 - my deployments were 6 years before that but its a similar thing)

Sounds like a great way to pass the time with a group like that...

And now there are so many RPGs to choose from!

yeah, my group was more Pathfinder but I do remember a lot of Warhammer people (and we would always switch around for the short games just to keep things interesting)

Makes me chuckle to think of soldiers sitting around playing something like Golden Sky Stories just because of the contrast.

> Originally released in Japan as Yuuyake Koyake, Golden Sky Stories is a heartwarming, non-violent role-playing game that’s great fun for all ages. It takes place in a small town in rural Japan, and players take on the role of henge (...), animals with just a little magical power, including the ability to temporarily take human form. They do not fight great battles or unearth valuable treasures though; Golden Sky Stories adventures are all about helping others and becoming friends.

(very fun game though)

I'd be curious to see a playthrough of it

@Rubiksmoose So, a cheaper version of animal crossing? :P

@Tinkeringbell XD that is alarmingly accurate.

(minus all the money stuff)

Hahaha

And what do you do if you don't like the looks of your neighbor in that game? :P

hahaha maybe give them bad dreams until they went away? You'd get no dream points for that kind of unfirendly behavior though :P

Very much like animal crossing then :P Being rude to a neighbor has almost no effect there either ;)

@M.A.R. You must hate HPS lighting:

@Rubiksmoose Golden Axe is better.

@ShadowWizardWearingMask Maybe even Golden Sun lol

Looks like some areas have some funky green lighting going on, never seen that before.

Takes less energy, and is apparently easier on the eyes of animals, especially birds and bats

I don't know that part of Amsterdam.

I noticed that while I was poking around, good for bats and turtles. The green image is Tehran.

._.

Fun fact, some places use purple lighting in the bathrooms because you can't see your veins in that.

evil

It would be handy for the old folks home too!

I don't know. I encountered it in a bathroom once, it has a certain soothing quality as well

Thanks for y'all's answers about downvotes. :D

Just because I don't think I really answered... On SO Main: When the question fits any close reasons, is really poorly worded, no example explaining their current code/problem well enough for me to even piece it together... Stuff like that qualifies for a downvote. If the problem is pretty clear and I have something to at least think about/work with, I'll upvote, if not so that the OP feels recognized for their effort, so that others can recognize that it's a "good question" and weigh in.

I don't, because that's a vote i could have later used to downvote

There's plenty of other people who will cast up votes in my stead

For answers... If it... y'know... answers the question, and it's a good answer (no security risks, not an awful solution) I'll upvote. NAA's, security issue answers, etc. are qualified for a DV.

@user400654 If only that were true. Many of the sites are suffering for upvotes.

Super big bonus points if it's a generalized answer that's a sort of catch-all... What's the word... Canonical?

yeah, i only speak for SO

where no mater how dupe the question or answer is, or how bad they are, they're likely to receive an upvote anyway.

Does me using the thanks button ironically result in stats that suggest it should stay implemented?

Hidden stats that the CMs can see, and use to see the outcome of the A/B; yes.

@user400654 I'm sure "how many thanks votes were cast" will be a stat that's talked about, yeah

FWIW: I'm not a big SO user. I'm sub 500 rep, so I absolutely do not speak for the whole of the site, or even the larger portion which are new users who come with a couple questions and disappear.

I also don't speak for the site veterans and how their voting preferences go.

Just a solo take

Two things featured on SO, both sides of the coin: meta.stackoverflow.com/q/398367/3648282 meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/398537/…

Heh, yeah I laughed a bit when I saw that that second post was what the mods chose to be featured second.

The Dev (who can not be downvoted, and is locked at 101 reputation) took the first spot.

yea, that's what i meant. i don't begin to believe i speak for the majority, it's pretty clear that i don't

@Rob Dev?

@Tinkeringbell no clue. Busy replacing a million little details like that with Postgres trivia 😁

Postgres trivia are cool too :D No worries!

There is a non-trivial chance I posted details in a random comment somewhere last year though

Okay. Then I'll give up looking already XD

Pfft, don't fancy a mushroom hunt?

If it were mushrooms, I'd end up with something to eat at least.

Mmmm... Tasty stats...

Not that tasty ;)

Hard to beat a fresh morel fried in butter