I have a noobish question. When should discussion questions get downvoted? I know they should be downvoted if they show no research effort, but are there any other reasons?

@EkadhSingh That's primarily opinion based :D

On MSE, we've a strange mix of "We have reputation" and "we vote to show approval/disapproval"

Approval/disapproval on discussion questions?

Sure

My advice is take your time before committing to vote :D

Some may find these powers unnatural disagree with the premise of the question?

I’m not sure I understand

Example: SO is not very welcoming to new users because they get downvoted without comments <- surely will get downvoted

I see, that makes sense now, thank you :)

@EkadhSingh My recent question on the critieria for hiring CMs would be one example

And there's lots of great reasons to downvote it "It doesn't belong here" "I disapprove of Geek using this soapbox"...

AH!

Found it

@EkadhSingh meta.stackexchange.com/questions/329846/… here's an example of a discussion question I posted expecting and welcoming downvotes for 'stratergic reasons' :D

Thank you

Hello! I had a meta SO question and was hoping to get some clarity here before posting a proper question

I had my SO question closed a duplicate, but I feel that assessment is inaccurate (the duplicate is similar to my question, but not the same)

curious what the best way to appeal that closure/duplicate labeling might be

@Grimelios Well - your first edit gets you a free reopen vote. While I'm not sure about SO norms, on SE - posting a meta question politely bringing it up, and talking about the differences, and asking for advice might work

Don't forget, the goal of asking is to convince, not demand

I appreciate that and will keep it all in mind

thank you

@Grimelios there is a FAQ on how to proceed on duplicate closure: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252252/… see also similar questions: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/duplicate-questions (and their reception)

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@MetaAndrewT. I mean... that sounds like it could fall under "no research"... since that discussion has happened thousands of times.

I really wish people wouldn't downvote discussion questions - particularly well-written and thought-out ones that they disagree with. Someone takes the time to ask about something and it just happens to be something you disagree with - the response is to participate in the discussion - write an answer explaining why you disagree or upvote an answer that agrees with your PoV... downvoting the discussion (if many people do) makes it invisible to people.

I understand that I'm fighting an uphill battle and, by no means am I saying that they should never be downvoted, but... I rarely find them bad enough to be worth downvoting and, honestly, even duplicates I'd usually rather just close than downvote.

Just remove downvotes on questions (I'm actually somewhat serious here, though it will never happen)

Honestly, I've mentioned that a few times (for meta only) and I don't hate the idea - though we'd still need to be able to allow flags to downvote stuff, I think...

I feel like downvoting often becomes the response when there's no time to collect an argument against something, whether that's a discussion, FR... even a bug report and..., as I've experienced, an unpopular announcement about some policy change.

Some discussions are just not useful to have... and 'useful' is in the downvoting tooltip.

I think it's probably my most-downvoted feature request on meta

There's lots of discussions that I see that seem useful to have... and they still get downvoted to hell...

It's hard to draw a line between "unuseful" and "this makes me uncomfortable".

For me downvotes on questions are fundamentally less useful because they don't put good content at the top, like they do for answers. And for answers it is much more useful to clearly indicate bad or wrong answers than just crappy questions (where we also have the close system)

There's also lots that aren't useful to have, written with a tone of 'don't you dare tell me otherwise', or where the post may seem reasonable enough to warrant an answer but you already know the person that wrote it won't listen to any counterarguments anyways. Those aren't useful discussions to have in real life, and they're not useful ones to have here.

That's why we have close votes

@MadScientist Close votes for 'you won't listen to my answer'?

and delete votes

Meh.

@Tinkeringbell Downvotes aren't a punishment! If someone won't listen to you, either your argument is bad or they aren't worth the time. Just walk away or change your answer.

@Catija "they aren't worth the time" is the epitome of 'discussion isn't useful', and that's what downvotes are for!

In many cases duplicate closures are appropriate for discussions that aren't useful, because a lot of them are simply stuff we have discussed a hundred times already

@Tinkeringbell No? That's not true at all. It's just a mismatch of information in many cases.

And just as things get interesting... Gotta run, the mother's day celebrations are starting here. I'll get back to this.

And pretty much every one of my answers on crappy or bad faith meta questions are targeted at the rest of the community, not the asker themselves

You can't judge other people by your own experience and knowledge of the system. "Useful" doesn't mean "useful to me" it means - "would someone feel that this improves their experience if they were able to read it"? So - if someone's asking about something that they don't understand, either it can be closed because we've had the question a zillion times, edited to make it less of an attack, or answered.

For example - I'm curious about why this is getting downvotes:

This seems like the sort of thing rene or Glorfindel would answer with some info from SEDE.

Yeah, it could use a bit more detail - but... it's an interesting question.

@Catija I see comments :D

tho, TTA is a different thing I guess

Yeah. Sure

This is different, too, though - occasional questions getting answered years later doesn't mean that it's expected.

I wonder if its even possible to pull that out, especially across the network

You'd be literally looking at post times of 'every' post on a site

@Catija it's another kind of "boo hoo, I don't get answers plz halp" - at least that's my best guess. Personally I did upvote, it's a valid discussion, OP doesn't ask to change anything and the ranting is only implied.

There's probably a quite obvious point once the question drops of the homepage (for non-SO sites) and once it drops of the question page or the per-tag question pages on SO

What percentage of questions get an answer after 1 hour, 2 hours, 4 hours, 8 hours, 16 hours.... etc.

Revival and Necromancer badges! (dunno why the ID for Revival from Anime.SE is different from Meta.SE)

.... Actually... that makes sense

@MetaAndrewT. I wonder if you can get those on your own posts.

But you'd also need to cross reference those with first answers

@EkadhSingh IIRC yes

@MetaAndrewT. can I gank that?

@JourneymanGeek good to know. Well, time to self-answer one of my really old questions to try and get it.

Revival seems like a really good metric

@JourneymanGeek sure, I'm lazy with SEDE

Ganked

Is it known how effective bounties actually are?

@EkadhSingh For certain values of effective

Depends on the site too

Not so effective is there's no valid answer at such moment (I'm not into the "there's no answer right now" answers)

Ok

@MetaAndrewT. Yeah, that is pretty annoying. Cross-site you have to use the badgename.

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@Catija Probably support though, and not discussion?

@user1271772 if you're going to misrepresent my comments by selectively quoting them, they're just going to get deleted.