Especially with Terraria. Between the already existing answers on this site and the wiki itself, that game has been documented extremely well. For any Terraria question you can think of, nine times out of ten, a couple minutes of research should get you the answer without having to post to this stack.

@Exerion yes, I've seen that effect as well. Also quite a lot of questions are being closed with some of the voters having basically no score in that tag. When a question is then being closed for stupid reasons it's really having a bad taste and it will obviously scare off new people. I like how things are now being addressed on SO. The SE staff wants to do something about this unfriendly welcoming, but it seems that it hasn't been established over here (yet).

@dly Closers are not required to have tag expertise, so that's a false premise from the start. Regardless, voting is curation. It has absolutely nothing to do with welcoming, friendliness, or kindness.

@Frank you're probably right about the closing, but I've seen already multiple questions closed as unclear while the questions were indeed clear to someone knowing the game. Such votes coming from people with little to no tag expertise does have a bad taste, because reopening questions is very hard on Arqade.

And you're very wrong with downvotes not having anything to do with the welcoming effect. When I come here as a new user and earn a -5 right from the start with no one telling me what I did wrong it is definitely not welcoming or kind and it will never be. The votes may all be there for a reason, but they're not helpful to new users without explanation about why the question is bad or being downvoted. The voters are expecting heavy research and a perfectly written text, but how many new people know that?

Gaming questions are rarely “useful” or “high-quality”. In most cases, these are personal questions that will interest the author himself and, perhaps, another 1-2 people on the Internet. It is one thing if the questions are closed due to a lack of research, another thing when they are downvoted, simply because they are “not very useful” for other participants.

I understand that se is positioning itself as a place of accumulation of knowledge, useful to different people. So, the question asked, ideally, should generate additional traffic, when another person will google the same problem in the future. But gaming questions are not the ones that are particularly similar among different players AND times.

@dly If you're earning a -5 right from the start, then you haven't done your research, and your post has been deemed not useful. If you don't like that, then perhaps the new user should be doing some research ahead of time to learn how Arqade works, and maybe trying to solve their problem before asking? Being welcoming is about not leaving snarky comments. It has nothing to do with downvoting. Curation is curation. Full stop.

@Frank for example click and click were highly downvoted at the beginning and received some upvotes later after I took them to Meta. I get your point about curation, but people sometimes don't behave like that. They see a -1, think it's a bad question and "agree", although they probably wouldn't have downvoted it in the first place. Or there's something in the queues.. that kills even legit questions.

@dly If you think people are bandwagoning, then provide proof. Votes are anonymous, so you have a high bar to hit to prove that. Voting is a personal judgement of content, which, after time, approximates the true value. Legitimacy is utterly irrelevant to question quality, so that's a complete non-starter. We don't care if you're actually having the problem; what matters is if the question is a good fit for the site. There's plenty of questions that are, "legit", but don't work here.

The point is, downvotes are curation of content. Friendliness, kindness, and being welcoming are all something else. None of which compromise our quality standards. Those are the standards all posts must meet, whether posted by a 1 rep user, or a 100k rep user. That's our bar.

meta.stackexchange.com/questions/135/… 10 years old, +1k .. I can't be that wrong. After all we're still Q&A. Curation is not just done by voting, it's also done by teaching and learning. If the authors can be taught into our ways they can fix their posts and write better ones in the future. Win-Win.

@dly Those two examples seem pretty bad IMO. I'm still surprised that car question stayed; it's way too unspecific and related to technical terminology, not to games. The CS:GO one is basically a "why is my computer not performing well?" question; which also seems like a pretty poor fit for this site. It seems weird to assume it was just a bandwagon. As far as your linked meta discussion, I don't see what that changes. They want to encourage comments on downvotes; but it isn't required. Not everyone can leave nice comments with the downvotes, so it doesn't always help to do so.

@dly I see your meta question, and raise you with explicit commenting guidelines. It literally says to refrain from commenting. That is what welcoming is about. It has nothing to do with voting, up, down, close, or otherwise.

@Frank stop right there.. don't use half quotes and put them out of context. It says Refrain from commenting if you're not willing to make an earnest attempt to check for tone. And this Meta is about the language in comments, not the comments themselves. Yes, you never have to comment, but it would certainly be helpful in some cases (not all of them of course). I don't want any rules in place to make people comment their reason for a downvote. But a salvageable question that can be fixed by pointing the OP in the right direction is more helpful than just clicking on the thumb down.

@JMac they may not seem very useful, but still do fit.. racing terminology is pretty much the same in gaming and the real world. So is terminology in association football and the FIFA games or warfare and Call of Duty, etc. And why should tech support be off-topic? It's widely accepted in minecraft (as long as it's not modded) and other games..? I'm not talking about those questions to be impacted by bandwagon votes, but how quickly a question can be at -4 or -5 or even closed.

@dly If you don't want rules for downvotes, then why are you equating them to friendliness and being welcoming? You're way off base for that.

@Frank where did you read that I wanted a rule for that in the first place? I began with how I like the changes made on SO and you countered it. If I wanted to change the rules for something here I'd raise an own Meta for it. Also it's especially you who commented a lot on new user's questions with the "everybody wins" copy&paste. That makes me wonder why you're so much against the very same thing.

You linked to an old meta post about commenting. You're also implying that curation activities are unfriendly, unkind, and against the CoC. That is what I'm challenging. That's a fundamental misconception of this movement, and common enough that it needs to be pushed back against.

That's just my opinion, though. Downvotes are indeed not welcoming to new users, but they're there for a reason.

Yes, and that reason has literally nothing to do with being welcoming.

/facepalm .. the reason does not have anything to do with it (and I never questioned that), but what does it look like when you come to a new place and 5 people literally tell you that you're an idiot instead of telling you what you're doing wrong? THAT'S what welcoming is all about. I don't question the votes at all. I do question that some posts have extremely bad score with no feedback, although it's not even a bad post ... it's just written quite poorly. It's pretty much like getting an F at school without knowing what it is for.

The votes are feedback. They're just not desirable feedback, which is your whole problem. Votes do nothing to tell you you're an idiot. If you see a rude comment as such, flag it. If you feel votes are telling you such, you need to readjust your perceptions, because they're flat out wrong. A poorly written post is a bad post. Full stop. That's literally the point of voting.

@Frank I already agreed that the votes are there for a reason. You don't have to repeat yourself over and over again. The poster just doesn't automatically see why the post is bad and a nice comment may eventually fix it. That's all. And seeing that it's mostly you who comments on such posts with that c&p text I don't see why you're so much against it. You already do that. Again, it is our right to downvote bad posts. I never questioned that. But sometimes it is better to tell the OP why the post is bad and how to fix it, if it's not complete trash that deserves a -10.

@dly I don't think you're going to convince this particular user to see your side of this