tea.mathoverflow.net - Discussion Feed (How do we encourage people to vote more freely?)

Anton Geraschenko comments on "How do we encourage people to vote more freely?" (42)

Anton Geraschenko — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:24:04 -0700

Though I'd like it if more people voted more, I'm opposed to increasing the 30 vote/day limit. Part of it is simply the analogy with elections. The opinions of people who vote will be more strongly represented in the scores of questions and answers, but there should be a cap on how large this imbalance gets. If there are users out there who vote 100 times a day, I feel like my votes are less important (and they are).

Another reason I'd be hesitant to change the 30 vote/day number is that the guys who built Stack Overflow did an extremely good job on the social engineering. Everything in the system is throttled for at least two reasons.

Throttling user activity deters spamming, sock puppets, and other unsavory activity.
Math Overflow is obviously designed to be a bit addictive, but it should not steal your soul. If you're voting more than 30 times a day or gaining more than 200 reputation per day, you're gently cut off to remind you that you probably want to do other things too. I don't feel like I can articulate it well right now, but I think that removing these restrictions would have a negative effect on our most active contributors.

Qiaochu Yuan comments on "How do we encourage people to vote more freely?" (37)

Qiaochu Yuan — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:40:32 -0700

I respectfully request more votes every day. I keep running out in the morning and not being able to vote up interesting questions in the afternoon.

Anton Geraschenko comments on "How do we encourage people to vote more freely?" (13)

Anton Geraschenko — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:48:31 -0700

We can try to come up with some kind of precise guidelines, but I don't think it will help very much. Basically, if you think a question is interesting (even just sorta interesting), vote it up. Don't think of a vote as a big deal. It's fine for an OK question to have 10+ upvotes, and it's fine for a fantastic question to have 100+ upvotes. If you like, take the badges as a guideline: Nice Question (10 upvotes), Good Question (25 upvotes), Great Question (100 upvotes).

I suspect Scott would be in favor of thinking of it like an election. Since you're a good citizen, you should vote (let's say this means you should vote at least 10 times per day). You have to give those votes to somebody, so give them to whichever posts you think are most deserving. If you think all the posts are terrible, then you can still be a good citizen by downvoting!

One practical thing I find confusing is remembering whether or not I've up-voted a question before. I don't see anything different between a question I've up-voted and one I haven't (except for immediately afterwards, so if I come back to a question later then I can't tell). So I have a minor concern about trying to up-vote twice and whether that will actually cancel out my previous up-vote, be ignored, or cause mayhem

If you've voted a post up (resp. down), then the up (resp. down) arrow (the one you pushed to vote it up) will be bright orange every time you look at the question. You will never be able to vote twice on the same post, and you can only change (or take back) your vote within the first few minutes of casting it. Let me know if you don't get this behavior. I suspect you just don't come across the 11 things you've voted on very often.

Andrew Stacey comments on "How do we encourage people to vote more freely?" (9)

Andrew Stacey — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 11:25:23 -0700

I don't know if I'm typical, but my working assumption was to up-vote really interesting questions to raise them out of the dross. But now I see I should have been up-voting just mildly interesting questions as there are some really dire questions around.

But really, I don't really have a sense of what makes a "worthy" question. As yet, I wouldn't say that there have been any really interesting questions. This may be because my subject area is a little under represented at the moment, but also because an interesting question for me has to be a) answerable but b) not immediately answerable. However, those aren't really good mathoverflow questions!

Maybe you should come up with some guidelines so that those of us unsure as to what should and shouldn't be voted up (can we come up with a better verb than 'up-vote'?) can use that to help us form our own rationale for voting.

One practical thing I find confusing is remembering whether or not I've up-voted a question before. I don't see anything different between a question I've up-voted and one I haven't (except for immediately afterwards, so if I come back to a question later then I can't tell). So I have a minor concern about trying to up-vote twice and whether that will actually cancel out my previous up-vote, be ignored, or cause mayhem.

Anton Geraschenko comments on "How do we encourage people to vote more freely?" (7)

Anton Geraschenko — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 11:05:26 -0700

I think the only problem is that people don't have a good idea of what is a good score for a good question. Eventually people will realize that it's ok for a question to have 50 upvotes if it's really good. Of course, it would be best if we could get people to upvote questions they like, regardless of how many upvotes they already have, but I can't think of any way to do that. This is still a problem on Stack Overflow too.

I think we're actually doing okay as far as voting goes. Almost everybody on the first page of users is above 250 rep and all the users on the second page are above 100 rep.

The one thing that I would emphasize is that if you're willing to spend your time answering a question, you should probably vote it up.

Scott Morrison comments on "How do we encourage people to vote more freely?" (2)

Scott Morrison — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 10:04:37 -0700

I think especially early on, the more people vote, the better off we'll all be. There's a limit of 30 upvotes per person per day, and I think active users should aspire to hitting that!

So far David Brown is the only user with a "Civic Duty" badge for voting 300 times.