V'dibarta Bam

1:16 AM

@MonicaCellio Community Bulletin!

2:21 AM

@MonicaCellio What if I have a specific concern that I want to check about a specific user, with an excuse and a doctors note?

@MonicaCellio Assuming there are no yichud issues, could we discuss this in a private mod room?

Monica Cellio

@GeminiMan oh! Sorry, didn't make the connection. And I've just discovered that we don't have a tag for parshat bamidbar (just for the sefer), which is probably why msh210 didn't add it when he added nasso for next week. If anybody would like to search through questions with the book tag to find ones that are about the parsha and create a new tag, please go for it -- and let a mod know so we can create the event.

@YEZ sure, hang on while I set up a room. (And yes, if you want to talk with mods about a sensitive issue, that's the right thing to request.)

Gemini Man

2:48 PM

@MonicaCellio Someone prefers a different spelling! judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/parshat-bemidbar

Monica Cellio

@GeminiMan thank you! Community bulletin updated.

And updated this list (which I'm pointing to because I don't know how recently anyone's looked at that question, so feel free to make any other updates you notice need to be made).

YEZ

6:50 PM

@MonicaCellio Re yesterday's discussion, he has enough rep now to make comments, if that affects how to deal with the flag.

Monica Cellio

@YEZ ok thanks for letting me know.

YEZ

@MonicaCellio Really I just wanted to publicly talk over everyone else's head. :-)

Monica Cellio

@YEZ I'm tempted to delete this conversation to add to the mystique.

Monica Cellio

7:58 PM

@MonicaCellio so its not working on all of them =/ right now "will Moshiach know.." only has 2 links. — Baby Seal 1 min ago

@BabySeal chat may work better for this than a comment thread. I don't see a comment from you on that post.

YEZ

8:17 PM

Is there a meta-discussion about the imbalance of reputation points for an upvote vs. a downvote? I want to read up on the logic of that before asking a question.

Monica Cellio

8:29 PM

@YEZ I'm pretty sure I've seen such discussions on MSE (will look in a bit), but meanwhile, see this blog post for some philosophy about questions vs answers and (a little about) penalties for DVs (to the voter). That's not what you asked, but it's probably part of the picture and, anyway, interesting reading.

YEZ

@MonicaCellio Thanks, will take a look. As you noted, I'm more interested in punishing people for saying dumb things.

Monica Cellio

8:40 PM

@YEZ I think the general philosophy of DVs being only -2 is to not scare people off from answering (or asking). If nobody thinks it has merit then they'll lose rep, but if it's controversial (some find value and some don't) they still get something out of it. +10/-10 (or +5/-5) might push toward the boring middle ground of totally unremarkable content. But I'm just guessing based on vague memories -- will try to find something on MSE for you.

YEZ

@MonicaCellio my problem is a not-so-extreme case of someone getting 8 downvotes and 2 upvotes and walking away with a net gain. It supports the slow and steady rise of low-quality but persistent users.

219

Q: Should the weight of downvotes be increased?

When we started Stack Overflow, we wanted to make sure that downvotes were more of a visual and psychological motivator than a punitive action. That's why upvotes are +10 downvotes are -2, and cost the casting voter -1 However, recently, I've seen Marc Gravell and Jon Skeet both say similar ...

Monica Cellio

@YEZ yup, definitely seen complaints about that phenomenon.

@YEZ that's a pretty important question for your purposes. One problem that pervades MSE (and certainly did back when that question was asked) is the "SO-centric" view -- people there are (on a quick skim) mostly talking about voting patterns on SO, which aren't necessarily the same as on other sites. Someone there commented about increasing the penalty to fend of the "just for grins" DVs, but on some sites it's hard to get people to DV enough. Very different patterns...

YEZ

@MonicaCellio plus that is closed and declined. So I don't know what the course of action is - but I feel that post is spot on

@MonicaCellio My issue is it affects how I vote. When I see a somewhat quality post of a low-quality user, I am inclined not to upvote because I don't want to contribute to his/her steady rise. Machshil es harabim.

Monica Cellio

@YEZ I like the suggestion in a comment that upvotes offset by downvotes shouldn't give rep -- so if something is +5/-1 then ok, the answer still gets 40 (not 48), but if it's +1/-5, he gets nothing from it. The issue you talked about arises when most but not all voters downvote something -- then one person comes along and undoes the effect.

@YEZ I strive to vote based on content and not on who the poster is, but we're human and we can't avoid factoring that in. (And I don't agree with proposals that have been made from time to time to hide the author until you vote; it feels juvenile.)

YEZ

8:56 PM

@MonicaCellio I liked that one too.

Monica Cellio

If you're going to consider the poster, then try to consider the trend line too -- is this someone who started off posting bad stuff but has been getting better? If so, maybe you want to reward the better behavior?

YEZ

@MonicaCellio since that post was locked over 4 years ago, is there any way to suggest it be revisited?

Monica Cellio

@YEZ you could ask a new question on MSE. (I've seen people do that for old declined feature-requests.) In your post you should link to the locked post and explain what's different now -- why should this be reopened beyond "I don't like that answer". In other words, make a fresh case but draw on prior art. Make sense?

There are a...lot...of MSE posts about downvotes, rep, and costs. I think I'm going to stop looking for more needles in that haystack now; I think you've got the main one anyway.

YEZ

@MonicaCellio I could also pretend I don't know about the old question and just ask

Monica Cellio

@YEZ you could, but you risk it being closed as a duplicate of the older one, and then you'd just have to argue for why it's different and should be reopened. IMO it's better to fend that off from the start. Remember that while here it can take hours or even days for a question to be closed, on MSE it can happen within a minute or two.

YEZ

9:06 PM

Active much more recently:

6

A: Why do down-votes not subtract the reputation increase granted by up-votes?

Good question! In lieu of an official explanation, I'm going to hazard a guess: Upvoting is an inherently positive action. People in good moods, feeling generous and happy to see your content are going to upvote. The increased reputation results in awards and accolades. Downvoting is a darker ...

Monica Cellio

@YEZ ah, forgot about that one. That one is a support request asking "why is it this way"; I suspect you want to make a feature-request.

YEZ

yah. But it means it's not "off the radar" for 4 years.

Monica Cellio

True.

Point 1 here seems salient (and malicious DVs are definitely a thing in some parts of the network):

20

A: Should the weight of downvotes be increased?

Having had a few months to think about this, I'm no longer sure it's a good idea, for two reasons. Downvotes were always essentially cosmetic, with an extremely minor effect on reputation. Despite this, received downvotes are taken quite seriously by users. Almost too seriously. If we raise the...

YEZ

@MonicaCellio I just came across that.

@MonicaCellio I think it would be hard to explain on MSO why it is more important here. I can't say "you guys are doing programming and we are doing stuff that really matters" (and that isn't exactly what I would say anyways but...). But it is more serious here, as we have people uninitiated coming, and thinking they are getting authentic answers. I guess DV on each answer mitigates that, but still...

To put it differently - on other sites, reputation is a tool to measure how much I should acknowledge an answer, perhaps to try it out or look further - it is a means of sorting. Here, it is a measure of how reliable are you to tell me the emes.

Monica Cellio

9:23 PM

I don't think it's wise to look for unverified truth on any SE site. We say it's more important here for reasons we both understand, but to the person writing a mission-critical control system for a passenger aircraft, his programming question is also critically important, as is the chemistry question related to pharmacy, or... insert more examples here. Nobody should be taking the word of an answer here on its own for something that really matters, which is why sources are so important.

So please do downvote answers that are wrong, unsourced, or dangerous in some way, but don't assume we're unique. All that said, another viable approach is to make a feature request on our meta; the com team does look at the per-site metas from time to time. If you post here you should talk about the Mi-Yodeya-specific issues.

YEZ

@MonicaCellio Yes, but there it is a starting point - sorting what is worth looking into. You can test your mission control or your chemistry. You can't test whether or not you'll get spiritual excission for what you find here.

And not everyone is aware enough to realize what's authoritative and what isn't - someone new to Torah Judaism, especially coming from a world of moral equivocation, will see things differently.

Monica Cellio

@YEZ true (though perfect testing doesn't exist in my experience), but you can "test" a Mi Yodeya answer against other sources, your own rabbi, etc. A lot of sites with more-subjective content have the problem of evaluating answers you can't fully verify.

@YEZ with luck such a person is being guided by a rabbi who can say "yes pay attention to Rambam, no don't listen to Cellio". (Ok I hope not the latter, but you know what I mean... and I didn't want to cast aspersions on a real source.)

YEZ

@MonicaCellio I will test, yes, and can evaluate on my own to a large extent. But new-to-Torah users will have a harder time

Monica Cellio

Kind of related:

3

Q: Make for yourself a website?

Can a site like mi.yodeya.com be used for one to fulfill our sages mandate of "Make for yourself a Rav"? Obviously I meant this facetiously. Of course a website cannot take the place of a rav, but did you see some of the halachic questions that are being asked and sound like they are being asked...

halacha posek-psak-decisor-ruling stackexchange

5

Q: Is Mi Yodeya helpful?

Does anyone here feel that this site is helpful? I do, but is it Bitul Torah? Because you could always go look up the answer in a sefer and get more schar.

torah-study stackexchange

10

Q: Publicly Teaching Halacha

I was looking at this site and was a little bit surprised at this statement: It is therefore forbidden for Jews to teach non-Jews Halachah Is this true? (See a related question on the Meta).

halacha gentiles adult-learning

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