I love this analogy. I should note that my home is sometimes treated as a library (when the kids are doing their homework) and the library can sometimes be more of a play area (when they host community events). But the default matters. Discourse, for better or worse, has the default of being a more relaxed discussion forum. It’s collaborative rather than adversarial. Q&A will be the exception for most Discourse communities.
I have mixed feelings. I do think downvotes can be a kinder way to express disagreement than the alternatives. Having fielded many complaints about downvotes, the biggest concern people have is that anonymous downvotes feel unfair in the context of a connected reputation system. People want to know why they were downvoted. On the surface they want to know in order to fix the problem. In reality, I suspect most want to argue with the downvoter and there’s nothing for them to hang the argument on. That’s usually a good thing since those arguments are rarely productive.
Downvotes, especially on questions, is a tougher fit on Discourse given the collaborative nature of most forums. I’m not sure question voting would be something people would want if it were developed without the Stack Overflow example. In an idealized world, votes would reflect the quality of the question:
- Does it clearly explain the problem?
- Does it provide enough context for others to explore the issue?
- Does it cut to the chase and avoid unnecessary backstory?
- Does it fall into the community’s area of expertise?
The harsh reality is that question votes tend to reflect the feelings of the community toward the question. If you are asking about the NullPointerException error on Stack Overflow, you are going to have a bad time no matter how well you ask. It’s been asked about a million times before and people aren’t interested in answering another version of the question.
Maybe that’s a feature of question voting and not a bug. If so, it’s a feature that makes sense when there are so many questions the community can’t keep up. It’s not a feature that helps newly formed communities or communities that are usually collaborative forums that occasionally dip into Q&A. In other words, I’m not sure question voting helps a very large number of Discourse communities. So I think it should be a setting that defaults to “disabled”.
I recently suggested Post Voting to a client who was collecting questions for video AMA. The old system was to take the top X questions submitted according to likes. The person asking questions didn’t have an easy way to sort replies to the request for questions. Post Voting works great for this because the replies are sorted automatically. The included question vote, however, is pointless and confusing. Many people are visiting the community in order to submit their questions for the AMA. Likes would be a useful signal. Downvotes? Probably a misclick or experimentation with the new feature. I’m going to remove it via CSS this afternoon.[1]
There are a few other adjustments I need to make so that it works with their theme so it’s as good a time as any to fix this annoyance too. ↩︎