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 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
@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
@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.
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.
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.
@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.
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
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:
Can anyone else confirm my suspicions here? I have found that whenever I post a new question, if it is going to receive any answers at all, it will happen within the first few hours of posting. After that, it is too far down the list of new questions for anyone to notice anymore. This is assuming...
@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