tea.mathoverflow.net - Discussion Feed (Upvotes)

Gerry Myerson comments on "Upvotes" (11246)

2010-12-04T04:17:11-08:00

@Pete, I agree. Indeed, I see rather less of it here than in some other corners of the internet, and am pleased that for the most part we keep a civilized tone here and do not descend into personal attacks.

Pete L. Clark comments on "Upvotes" (11244)

2010-12-04T04:11:01-08:00

@Gerry: There are some of both in just about every walk of life. To the extent that one sees more of that here than elsewhere, I would point to the nature of internet interactions rather than MO per se.

Gerry Myerson comments on "Upvotes" (11243)

2010-12-04T04:08:18-08:00

Alex, I would distinguish between hot heads and thin skins. There are some of each on MO, and it can be unpleasant when they meet.

Alex Bartel comments on "Upvotes" (11234)

2010-12-04T00:05:27-08:00

Michael, I don't know what question and what answer you are talking about, but at the moment you are coming across as one of the hottest among those hotheads.

Robin Chapman comments on "Upvotes" (11233)

2010-12-03T23:44:39-08:00

Mr Hardy, please do not make unwarranted personal
attacks here.

Michael Hardy comments on "Upvotes" (11225)

2010-12-03T18:22:51-08:00

The same thing applies to "no" votes. Robin Chapman criticized one of my answers as off-topic, saying it didn't address the original question, in the process making it obvious that he had not read the original question. This was instantly followed by five downvotes. Lots of hotheads inhabit mathoverflow.

Dougy comments on "Upvotes" (11093)

2010-11-27T01:31:04-08:00

Hey, I didn't realise! Thanks for pointing that out. (:

Gerry Myerson comments on "Upvotes" (11091)

2010-11-26T20:51:23-08:00

Dougy, you might be interested to know that the same question was posted at MO, http://mathoverflow.net/questions/46793

Dougy comments on "Upvotes" (11090)

2010-11-26T19:20:34-08:00

Here's a math.SE example for you: my (as of yet, not up-voted) answer to: http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/11066

It took me about half a day to work out the mathematics details, write and debug the code and double-check the answer wherever possible. Although, I'm not too upset about this, it was quite an interesting exercise.

Qiaochu Yuan comments on "Upvotes" (11089)

2010-11-26T13:05:54-08:00

@Pete: I think one has to conceive of voting as having a different purpose on math.SE. Ultimately it is a signifier that the community finds a question or answer interesting and/or educational, and so it's not surprising that a question about class field theory isn't going to be well-received by that particular community. (Such a question should just be asked on MO instead!)

Pete L. Clark comments on "Upvotes" (11088)

2010-11-26T12:31:08-08:00

I agree with Qiaochu that to an extent this phenomenon is inevitable (and I also think that it's not especially pernicious.)

But there are some things one can do to combat it.

If I see a very specific, technical question, then I tend to vote it up if it is coherently worded and nontrivial, especially if it has few upvotes. An upvote here doesn't necessarily mean that I myself am interested in the question, but rather that it has the form of questions that I would like to see more of on MO. We've gotten pretty good at discouraging questions like "What kind of mouthwash do mathematicians use?" We could be a little better at encouraging questions like "Under what conditions does this spectral sequence degenerate?"

If I have taken the time to read through a somewhat complicated (correct) answer, then I may leave a comment indicating that I like it (and, implicitly, that I am vouching for it). If someone else that I respect does the same thing, then I may sometimes upvote an answer that sounds good even if I haven't checked it. This goes somewhat against my ingrained instincts, but an anonymous upvote is certainly not a certificate of correctness, and this site gets enough attention so that if there is an error in an answer it will probably come out sooner rather than later.

For what it's worth, I think the problem is much more severe on math.SE. In general that site seems seriously undervoted. My guess is that many of the "answerers" who are active on that site are not in the habit of voting up a question that are well-formed and demonstrate thought and effort on the part of the questioner, whereas most of the "askers" on the site vote up questions that they can understand. As a result, if you ask a question about how to evaluate a particular indeterminate form, you are likely to receive more upvotes than if you ask a question about class field theory which would give most professional number theorists some pause.

Anton Geraschenko comments on "Upvotes" (11086)

2010-11-25T21:32:57-08:00

In that thread, I proposed the experiment of hiding the score of each post to see if it would change voting habits, but it didn't seem reasonable to impose something like that on Joe User, especially since running social experiments is completely orthogonal to MO's purpose. But now that the issue comes up again, I realize that there's nothing wrong with giving people the option of running the experiment for themselves. So I added a bit of javascript that hides votecounts based on a preference cookie. You can set the cookie by visiting the preference tab in your profile page (you may need to clear your browser cache first so that you download the new javascript).

Since obfuscating the votecounts is done entirely client-side and I can't in any way know who sets the preference cookie, I won't be able to collect any hard data about how it changes people's voting habits, but I'd be curious to hear reports from people who use this "feature."

There's a better (non-javascript) way to implement this by customizing the css your browser uses when you visit MO (see this post for details), so I don't promise to keep this feature around. For now, I don't see any harm in it.

Qiaochu Yuan comments on "Upvotes" (11083)

2010-11-25T13:48:56-08:00

I think this is sort of inevitable. It is difficult to check a long and involved argument so few people will do it, even if those are some of the best answers on MO and the ones we should be working hardest to encourage. So instead we rely on various heuristics.

The best way to combat this, in my opinion, is for people to endorse answers they think are really good in the comments.

Todd Trimble comments on "Upvotes" (11078)

2010-11-25T11:34:55-08:00

Some of this seems very plausible, such as the need to overcome some inertia to get the upvotes going.

One thing that I've observed is that if an answer is snappy and at a level understandable to your everyday graduate student, then it is sure to get upvoted a whole bunch of times. Sometimes such answers are on the obvious side or require little mental effort. Answers that are harder and demand more specialized insight might get two or fewer votes.

Another thing is that certain patrons with very high reps seem to be amply rewarded no matter what they put down. Usually it's good stuff, but I think there's often something going on like "if it's written by Smuckers, it has to be good", and people will just vote it up regardless, even if it is not particularly to the point, or really should have been made community wiki.

I have to admit that it sometimes irritates me, when it looks as though many people aren't really using their noggins when they vote.

Greg Muller comments on "Upvotes" (11076)

2010-11-25T10:16:01-08:00

I was talking to some friends who are also MO patrons, and we noticed that shared the following phenomenon. Our decision whether to upvote a question or answer seemed to be based on different criterion, based on how many upvotes the question has received. There seemed to be three basic domains:

A) If the question or answer had received no upvotes, then we didn't want to upvote it unless we felt comfortable `vouching' for it; that is, either stating that it was a reasonable question or that the answer was correct. This was particularly strong when it was an answer either had details that were too involved to check, or referenced external articles we lacked the time to check.

B) If the question or answer had a few upvotes, we voted for it if it seemed like it could be correct and was well-written. This kind of upvote seems motivated by logic of the form "well, if thats correct, it should be worth 5 or so votes", drawing upon some sort of internal metric of how many votes a given question or comment SHOULD have.

C) If the question or answer already had many upvotes (say, 10 or more), we based our decision entirely on how much we liked it: whether it was cool, clever, exciting, had a pretty picture, made us laugh, etc. The idea here is presumably that the suitability of the question/answer had already been established, and that any other upvotes were a form of kudos or applause.

So, I guess my question is two-fold. First, whether this kind of phenomenon is as generic as it appeared to us; and second, whether this kind of thing should be encouraged or discouraged. Often I'll see questions that seem to be good questions in fields I am not an expert in, but I am discouraged from upvoting them because they have a low number of votes and I don't want to vouch for their suitability. Is this `correct'? If so, is it worth mentioning in the FAQ?