What's the point of voting on questions (especially downvoting)?

Question

I am curious as to the mentality behind upvoting/downvoting questions...

I can understand the logic behind upvoting/downvoting answers "ok if an answer is bad then downvote it" sure this kind of makes sense (though in my head is a bit silly. if it is a bad answer then let the person who answered it know and maybe they can revise it and then we all learn a little more...)

But the idea of saying "hey this is a good question" or "this is a bad question" doesn't necessarily make sense to me. And I am not saying that I don't know what a bad question is. I understand that a lot of the questions on AskUbuntu can be answered with a simple google search and maybe 10 minutes of homework.

So my question is what is the idea behind downvoting/upvoting questions?

Especially when you are able to downvote questions without saying why it is a bad question. And no I am no saying that to downvote you need to explain why you think it is a bad question. I am more saying, if you think it's a bad question or not worth your time then just leave it, rather than taking the time to downvote it?

Answer 1

Downvoting questions is an important moderation task which helps to filter out low quality posts from the site.

Case in point: A question which is closed (except when closed as a duplicate) and has no answers with positive score gets deleted automatically after a certain period of time (30 days?) if it has a negative score. This means moderators and users with delete vote privilege don't have to keep track of all the closed, low-quality questions with the intention to remove them later in order to keep the site "clean".

So I reckon the suggestion that "if you think it's a bad question or not worth your time then just leave it, rather than taking the time to downvote it" is not really a productive one.

Answer 2

if you think it's a bad question or not worth your time then just leave it, rather than taking the time to downvote it?

NO.

I'm not sorry. No.

I don't know how you use Stack Exchange sites or what you think their intended usage is, but I use it as a library*. When I browse this library, looking for something, I want good results. That means good answers. And that almost always means good questions. That means maintaining the sites: cleaning up useless crap, polishing the useful stuff, and ensuring that over time, there is more useful stuff than crap.

That means encouraging good questions ...

And...

Discouraging bad questions.

If there were no disincentive to posting crap, we'd be drowning it. Check my vote count on Ask Ubuntu:

5,088 up
6,167 down

But! That's my total vote count, including deleted posts. My surviving downvotes, on posts that haven't been deleted, is:

2,033 votes cast

That means a good two-thirds of the posts I have downvoted end up deleted. (For comparison, my surviving upvote count is 4,968 - some 2% have been deleted.) Now, you could say that some of the deleted posts I have downvoted may not have deserved it, but I say that some of the surviving downvoted posts do deserve deletion**, and these two balance each other out.

How much useful would you think the site would be, if for every useful post you see here, there's two crap posts? The search is bad enough as it is, but it would be far worse if you couldn't even use question score as a way to filter out sand.

Downvoting is, as pomsky says, a quality-control mechanism. There's a reason why downvoting questions is free (downvoting answers costs 1 rep): stem the tide of bad questions, and the number of bad answers that you then have to clean up automatically go down.

Aside from the roomba mechanism, which came rather late in the game, voting is the core quality control mechanism of Stack Exchange. Other systems depend on it: rate limiting, warnings, question bans. There's a lot that works with a signal as simple as a downvote.

---

* There's a reason I have posted something like ten times the answers on this site alone than I have posted questions on all SE sites combined. Most questions I have usually have been answered, or I have found answers I can adapt.

** Sometimes the roomba doesn't clean up posts that I have downvoted because some well-meaning idiot gave a sympathy upvote.

Answer 3

Quoting the mouseover help:

↑: This question shows research effort; it is useful and clear.
↓: This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful

Quoting the help center on upvoting:

What is voting up?

Voting up is how the community indicates which questions and answers are most useful and appropriate.

When should I vote up?

Whenever you encounter a question, answer or comment that you feel is especially useful, vote it up!

What happens when I vote up?

When you vote up, you are moving that content "up" so it will be seen by more people.

Quoting the help center on downvoting:

What is voting down?

Voting down, also known as "casting downvotes", is how the community indicates which questions and answers are least useful.

When should I vote down?

Use your downvotes whenever you encounter an egregiously sloppy, no-effort-expended post, or an answer that is clearly and perhaps dangerously incorrect.

What happens when I vote down?

When you vote down, you are nudging that content "down" the page, so it will be seen by fewer people. Voting down answers is not something we want you to take lightly, so it is not free.