There were a couple of comments about down-voting on the main site and on meta. This might be a good space to chat about that.

One idea was that down-votes discourage new users. What action would you recommend instead of down-voting?

One idea was that down-voting is necessary to maintain the quality of questions. How could you achieve that without turning off inexperienced users that might become valuable contributors?

Hello Karsten, I am glad that you as a new moderator opened this topic. Down voting in SE Chemistry is one of the major problems with a very high nuisiance value. There is a persistent user who keeps downvoting shamelessly. Even my occassional queries are downvoted without any reason. Uhoh is another user who posts good queries and his queries get downvoted too.

My suggestion was that either get rid of down vote option or when someone down vote a pop up window should appear which ask the reader to write a reason. This will discourage lazy down voters who just press this button.

With the current rules, down-voting without comment is allowed. If the community feels there is too much downvoting, we can just upvote. You could see it as a double-filter.

One set of people downvotes 2/3 of all new questions. Some of them I feel are not salvageable, so I don't do anything. Some of them I feel need work, so I upvote them and do the work, or ask for the work to be done in the comments. The new user will have a +8 reputation, and know that some are critical of the question and some see potential in it. This might be better than no interaction at all, and no reputation.

I am unfamiliar with chat rooms, but this one is public and I have also invited BuckThorn, so maybe we will get another opinion in the room.

Nobody (even moderators, and I am not one) can see who downvotes. However, if a users reputation keeps decreasing, downvoting a lot is a possible reason. Nevertheless, I would refrain from calling out names, and instead stay general, like "someone who frequently downvotes", or "someone who often edits questions of new users" etc. This describes the philosophy without pointing fingers.

I agree, many questions are low quality. They should be deleted rather than contaminating the Q&A sequence. These low quality questions serve no purpose. The key question is how to deal with those habitual downvoters. The most frequent downvoter rarely contributes an answer. How do I know, because the person himself acknowledged in a chat room that he downvotes a lot some time ago.

I do remember users who were asking low-quality questions and giving low-quality answers at first. However, they learned how the site works, improved their research skills and now are making great contributions.

One advantage of downvoting is that questions disappear from the main feed for everyone except for high-rep users.

Oh probably that is why I see a lot of downvoted questions.

I think the threshold is -4, orthocresol mentioned something like that. I have to go, but I will check in later again.

You are right, -4 greys out the answer/question.

I think the pattern must be observed for habitual users.

sorry habitual down voters

Answer: leaving a constructive comment to help the user improve the question. Also, simply improving it yourself is often a good alternative.

There's no proof that downvoting is necessary for anything.

I like the idea, but unfortunately, by the time someone is able to upvote (thereby counter-acting a downvote), it's often too late: Someone's question has had a -1 next to it for long enough for it to be embarrassing, humiliating and discouraging.

If a question is so bad that you think it would be best for everyone if the question is removed (greyed out), then I would recommend to simply remove it in other ways, rather than waiting for it to accumulate a net score of -4 which can take a very long time.

@Nike Dattani, Your points are very useful but how to discourage or deal with habitual down voters who blindly down vote without saying a word.

@AChem One of the only things you can do is find out who the downvoters are and confront them about it!

@KarstenTheis Ironically, there was a bug today which did allow moderators to view individual people's votes: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/381154/… I don't want to check if it still works.

Anyway, I think the issue lies with the posts where you look at it and think "does that really deserve -2", but you also don't think it's a particularly exemplary question which should be at +2 either. In such cases it's easy to do nothing, and thus the downvoters win.

@orthocresol I think the bigger issue is the fact that people make it -2 in the first place.

Yeah, but hear me out first

Sure

I'm not sure about just "upvoting to cancel it out" -- it's fine if you want to do it (votes are personal!) but perhaps consider what about the post makes you think that it's not worth a -2. Is there something in the question which makes it a useful one to SE - if so then perhaps an edit is in order to highlight it. A number of times on Chem I've seen that a good edit from andselisk can turn a post around.

basically make it worth the upvote, if that makes sense.

I don't know what to do about people who habitually downvote. I know they exist, but I'm not sure what I can do -- suspend them?

For the record, I never used the phrase "upvoting to cancel it out". I wanted to clear that up since you put it in quotes.

Oh, okay, sorry; that wasn't meant to be a verbatim quote, just a summary of the idea.

You can pretend the quotes aren't there.

^ So I largely agree with this. I think these are the constructive actions that users have to deal with the issue of negativity

I'm aware it probably sounds hypocritical, because I really haven't done much of this myself recently at all. (And that's a large part of why I'm quitting.) But, well... just my 2c.

A while ago I toyed with the idea of deleting posts that were unsalvageable so that they wouldn't linger on the front page. I did stipulate that in such cases it should be mandatory to post a comment explaining why. I still think that in principle this is a good thing, but in practice, I don't know.

After finding that SEDE query for AChem, I was curious to run it myself. @orthocresol it seems that when I look at all users with at least 200 rep and at least 100 votes, you come up as one with the greatest downvote-upvote ratios:

Does that let you separate by question and answer downvotes?

@orthocresol the query was written by a user named fra-san, and does not have that capability offered out-of-the-box", but it's possible to improve the query.

You have voted 5,993 times on questions and 4,792 times on answers, but I'm not sure how those are split up/down. The SEDE query could certainly be improved.

Well, I don't think it's likely to be all that different tbh.

Nike Dattani, Thanks for showing the information. 28,000 down votes- This is pathological.

This user must be banned.

@orthocresol I think you're right. You've downvoted more times than you've voted on questions, and you've downvoted more times than you've voted on answers. Even if 100% of your votes on questions (or answers) were downvotes, the other category would still have at least 600 downvotes.

@AChem I totally agree that Mithoron has been a toxic force on this site for years, and I've heard multiple complaints about that user from many angles (nothing even to do with downvoting... until an hour ago I didn't even know that this user had been downvoting so much, though I did suspect it). However, I don't think that "banning" a somewhat productive member of the community is a good move.

First of all, it doesn't accomplish much, because people who get "banned" don't overnight lose their addiction for using the site. Eventually a new username pops up will probably pop up and do the same things from different IP addresses, and it becomes harder and harder to deal with.

At least Mithoron's toxicity must be curtailed by suspension. This is indeed a disease.

I think the best course of action would be to invite the user to a chat, and try to discuss the issue with them. Many of the users on this site are scientists. Scientists tend to have done exceptionally well during their school years, and are accustomed to being considered the smartest one in their family or other social social circles. This means they often think they are right without convincing evidence.

I guarantee they would disagree with the suspension, and since the suspension removes their ability for them even to voice their opinion on the issue or defend themselves, they are likely to get extremely angry and retaliate.

I did try with this gentleman.

On the other hand if a handful of us point the issue out to them in a polite way, we might be able to change their mind at least a bit, and then maybe there won't be a need to suspend anyone. It seems that we outnumber this user right?

I tried tell him gently in many comments. He usually got those comments deleted.

Well now there's two of us that can try together :) I'm not sure how @KarstenTheis feels about it, but sometimes to open up someone's eyes, it helps to have a lot of "united" people presenting their case together in unison.

"This means they often think they are right without convincing evidence." should say, "when there's not enough convincing evidence in the contrary."

I agree Nike. No harm in trying again to convince them. I see orthocresol has down voted a lot but he also provided high quality answers.

@AChem You're right; I downvote a lot. However, clearly we disagree on philosophy. You seem to think that all downvotes are bad. I don't agree with that. I think downvotes are needed, especially for answers which are plain wrong. Here is the last thing I downvoted: chemistry.stackexchange.com/a/167046/16683

And I preach what I say practice what I preach (ugh). Above, I argued that comments and edits are the constructive actions available to users. In my time here, I've contributed over 3,000 edits to improve content quality, many of which are non-trivial. This, in my opinion, is how you can best stop downvotes. I don't do it a lot anymore nowadays, unfortunately.

If your solution to downvotes is to stop the voting itself-- that's fine. That's your opinion & you are welcome to it! But mine is fundamentally different. I think that downvotes reflect the content, and a solution which tackles the root cause must involve improving the content.

@orthocresol, That is a perfectly valid downvote because you as a courtesy educated the answer author. My only point is towards people Mithoron and many others like him who do not bother to write answers, just press down vote buttons and walk away. To curtail such habits, it might be useful by following exactly what you did. You wrote a comment after down voting. If this is automatic, i.e., someone presses down vote, and reason box appears just like "Close Vote".

And bad questions, in the opinion of the 5-6 moderators should be deleted rather than appear in the feed.

I'm ambivalent about automatic comments on downvotes, but more realistically, it simply won't happen. That would require a change to SE, and I'm certain that Meta.SE is littered with rejected proposals.

I think, perhaps, we can encourage people to do it via meta, but that's about as much as we can realistically hope for.

Yes, encouragement and education might slowly change the mindset.

A discussion about this could be opened after the election, imo; things will change with two new mods and two mods leaving.

I had opened this discussion: chemistry.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5056/…, Ironically it got +10 and -7.

Oh, that's one aspect of meta which frustrates me. I think there's some general opposition to people pointing out less-than-ideal things about the site on meta.

This hasn't always been a thing. Many years ago there was a lot of momentum towards reworking the homework policy. We never got anywhere with it, and there was plenty of disagreement, but I don't think the community was as ... stubborn as they are now. Nowadays I get the sense that people are lazy to change things, and any departure from status quo is viewed with suspicion.

In that case, though, I'm sure that at least some of the downvotes come from your proposed solution. It's simply not possible. I told you that there, and I told you that here again today.

@orthocresol So do the moderators actually occasionally talk to each other (in there super-secret chat room)?

@KarstenTheis Oh yes. Occasionally we do.