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MSE was changed so all posts with score exceeding -9999 would show on the home page (formerly, the minimum score to appear on the home page was -8). Per-site Metas were given the option to opt-in to this with consensus.

[...] any other site can request a change for their site's meta as they see fit [...] If consensus indicates the site would appreciate the change, flag for a moderator to tag with to escalate it to the Community Team.

Quote from Berthold (CM) from this MSE post

Do we want Meta AU to include nearly all posts on the homepage regardless of score? I don't have a preference, but it seemed worth bringing up for debate.

This post's title was slightly modified from the MSO version of this

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    How likely is there to be a important Post with heavy downvotes?
    – Journeyman Geek
    Commented Sep 25 at 0:56
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    @JourneymanGeek As you know the AU Meta is a little more sedate than other Meta sites in SE so I suspect it would be unusual to see such a heavily down voted post. It cannot be ruled out completely though and I would therefore support this change in the interests of having complete transparency in the future.
    – andrew.46 Mod
    Commented Sep 25 at 2:32

4 Answers 4

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Apologies for the delay. This has now been enabled for the Ask Ubuntu Meta.

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  • Thanks for this! I am aware that there is a huge amount going on in CM land so I am grateful this small thing could still be done...
    – andrew.46 Mod
    Commented 2 days ago
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For a counter-argument to this: please check out muru's answer

I support showing everything on Meta.

The OP of the original MSE post makes a compelling point in my opinion, which is that important topics that are being discussed might go unnoticed if a post is hidden. Agreement or disagreement with the post is irrelevant, as both heavily downvoted posts and a heavily upvoted posts speak about the consensus on the topic - which may have also real-world (site) ripercussions.

Seeing the post in the first place is necessary in order to keep up with the consensus on new situations and with potential shifts in consensus on old situations. And obviously to form an opinon and express it, even when the number of votes has settled the overall consensus already.

Do we not need to be notified, when visiting Meta, that, say, taking edits that address grammar personally shouldn't be a thing because the relative question has been downvoted more than 8 times?

And, in general, are we allowed to further upvote a post that has 8 upvotes but not to further downvote a post that has 8 downvotes?

Furthermore Meta is a place of discussion, and silencing unpopular opinions (to me) kinda feels like censoship.

Addressing muru's answer, which makes a (per se) compelling and agreeable point about the low volume of questions that would be affected; while it's true that such a change wouldn't affect the site much, well... It wouldn't affect the site much.

According to muru's numbers, about one question in a hundread is currently hidden because of the amount of downvotes, so about a question in a hundread would suddenly resurface if this was sent live (for scale, one question voted -8 or less at most would suddendly pop up on the home page after the fact).

The low volume of questions that would be affected works against both arguments. Allowing this just wouldn't change too much.

So overall, in my opinion, even acknowledging the slimness of the chance of being able to see important topics being discussed, considering that, more compellingly at this point, as andrew.46 mentions in the comments it's desirable to "avoid the appearance of censorship", the scale is still tipped towards the positives.

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    I agree completely. We should avoid censorship on Meta and even the appearance of censorship.
    – andrew.46 Mod
    Commented Sep 25 at 6:32
  • Liking this to censorship feels like a stretch that gymnasts would be proud of. It's just the main homepage, not meta.askubuntu.com/questions or search results, etc. - basically the difference between seeing posthumous corporal punishment of equines like meta.askubuntu.com/q/20558/158442 everytime I open the homepage and hiding such noise when not really relevant. And of course, for important things that got heavily downvoted, mods and staff always have the option of featuring posts.
    – muru
    Commented Sep 25 at 23:22
  • @muru Likewise, for "posthumous corporal punishment of equines" mods (and users) have the option to delete the posts. The search argument doesn't really apply to my point, how am I supposed to search for something I'm not aware of at all? But anyways yes, not hiding anything is going to have its drawbacks, I'm not arguing that. Still for a place like Meta I'd choose full transparency (unlike what I'd choose for main). I mean, it's reasonable to despise seeing rants and other useless stuff on the home page, It's just that personally I'd prefer to see everything over missing discussions.
    – kos
    Commented Sep 25 at 23:47
  • @muru I understand where the disagreement comes from and I kinda feel the same about useless posts, perhaps you should voice your opinion in an answer, maybe other people will prefer hiding posts, too.
    – kos
    Commented Sep 25 at 23:47
  • Actually no, the low volume doesn't work in your favour, IMO, because "How many of those 68 questions can we make a good case for keeping around on the homepage for [six months]"? ... especially so when that will be done at the expense of some other post which isn't that poorly received
    – muru
    Commented Sep 26 at 4:34
  • @muru That's what I meant - with "works against both arguments" I meant exactly that. Not many posts worth reading will benefit from this (which I also acknowledge later), but also not many posts not worth reading will resurface / be visible; on the home page specifically, after the change, 1 at most judging by the figures
    – kos
    Commented Sep 26 at 5:39
  • Yes, but those resurfacing will be doing so at the expense of another not-as-badly-received post, so that's a net negative.
    – muru
    Commented Sep 26 at 5:41
  • @muru Not if they're worth reading (which again, I know there will only be a few) - the point is IMO (and again I understand the counter-argument - I'm not saying there are overwhelming advantages in allowing this from a "posts worth reading" standpoint), at the cost of 1 post more every 100 possibly not worth reading, I (personally) would take the chance and benefit of the, say, 20% of those (completely made up number, I don't know) that are worth reading AND have a transparency policy on the matter - cont
    – kos
    Commented Sep 26 at 6:06
  • @muru cont - which I think would be important as a matter of principle. The "expense" in this case is just pushing down older posts a bit further. Those in the home page have already sat there enough IMO (6 months). Newer post will still be browsable for about 6 months. It doesn't change much, does it?
    – kos
    Commented Sep 26 at 6:06
  • So if it doesn't change much, why change at all? This is a change you have to make, so just stick to the defaults instead and use featured for the rare exception instead of having trash stick around front-and-centre for 6 months. Basically: why isn't using featured good enough for those rare cases?
    – muru
    Commented Sep 26 at 6:24
  • @muru But what about the transparency? That's also a point I'm making. I'd wager all it'd take to enable this would be to flip a switch / make a trivial change manually (something like applying a patch in the git sense of things)? Essentially we're being asked if we would like this, so since we're being offered why not saying "yes" if we want the thing? For real "trash" there's still deletion as an option if really required, much like there's the featured option if really required, so either ways it's not that we'd be left uncovered.
    – kos
    Commented Sep 26 at 6:39
  • If a question would have been shown on the home page but was hidden due to this, it's just two clicks (even one, depending on the settings) away: sidebar -> questions. How is that not enough transparency?
    – muru
    Commented Sep 26 at 9:00
  • @muru "shadowbanning" perhaps fits better what's happening right now. It's content that is not really hidden, but it's not shown by default and you have to somehow search for it
    – kos
    Commented Sep 26 at 9:21
  • That's even more of a reach than calling this censorship. Shadowbanned posts usually can't be seen by anyone except the posters and moderators. These posts are visible in the general questions list, tags pages, search results, user profiles, etc. etc., except just the homepage.
    – muru
    Commented Sep 26 at 9:26
  • @muru I think the exact definition of "shadowbanning" changes based on who you ask. But yeah I didn't mean that end-of-the-spectrum acceptation of "shadowbanning". Let me elaborate on what I mean: I mean something like what happens with youtube videos addressing controversial topics. Those videos are usually not deleted, but they'll never be shown on the homepage and they'll sometimes be pretty hard to search for. The second part doesn't apply literally here. But still the content is put behind barriers, in a similar fashion.
    – kos
    Commented Sep 26 at 9:35
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Keep in mind that even though the question is downvoted, there may be a great (perhaps even canonical) answer in there that should be (a) at least seen by folks so that they can reference it in the future, (b) probably upvoted as well.

It's interesting to note that, among the most heavily downvoted questions, most of them have heavily upvoted answers.

Hiding posts that get quickly downvoted reduces the amount of time that the community has to see the answers as well as the questions.

Additional thoughts:

  • From Muru's much appreciated analysis, if only 1% of the posts on the site have 8 or more downvotes, and there are ~50 posts on the homepage, then the chances of there even being a single heavily downvoted question on the homepage is around 50%.

    Given that low volume, I don't think having them appear is a problem we need to worry about.

  • I do agree with Muru's point about "piling on" being a problem that will be exacerbated by this change. I do wish there were other solutions to this, such as (floating an idea) displaying a different score for users with < 100 rep (for instance) so that they don't get discouraged. For instance, a post might have a "true score" of -25, but only show -5 to users under 100 rep.

    It might also be nice if Closed questions with a certain negative score were hidden.

  • It's not common, but I've seen (even had) Meta questions turn around from a rapid-negative score to positive score. I believe I've had a question at ~ -6 (in the first hour) on Meta.SO that turned around and now has a net positive score of 66. Of course, that's a much larger volume Meta site.

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  • Again: 1. these posts are only hidden from the homepage. They're still visible on "the general questions list, tags pages, search results, user profiles, etc., etc.". So people can still reference and upvote and edit and do pretty much anything else they might be able to do with posts. Posts which are featured still appear on the sidebar. 2. A heavily downvoted post appearing on the front page does so at the expense of one which is less downvoted, and given how long posts are sticking around now, they'll be there for months. How is that justified?
    – muru
    Commented Sep 27 at 0:21
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    (1) I doubt most people typically look beyond the Home page on Meta. I know I don't unless I'm looking for something specific. (2) As for the "hiding another post", I just don't see this as a problem to worry about given the low frequency. I'd be okay with perhaps hiding low-scores after some extended period of time, but given the (currently only) two options to "hide immediately" and "hide never", I'd go with "hide never" myself.
    – NotTheDr01ds
    Commented Sep 27 at 16:29
  • 1. Then the way you say "(a) at least seen by folks so that they can reference it in the future, (b) probably upvoted as well" is patently misleading, since the posts can be referenced in the future and upvoted as well. 2. It takes time to get to -8. Plenty of time on a low-activity site like ours.
    – muru
    Commented Sep 27 at 22:09
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    @muru I'm certainly not try to be misleading, and I don't believe it is. If a post disappears from the Home page "too soon", then I'm not going to see it (and many others won't either). If it's going to be there a long time anyway while it gets slowly voted to -8, then I don't see how it's a problem. The longer it takes to reach -8, the sooner after that it will naturally scroll off.
    – NotTheDr01ds
    Commented Sep 29 at 18:55
  • There's definitely an implication there that hiding the question from the homepage somehow prevents you from referencing or upcoming answers to it. Neither of those are the case, and the way you have written it will definitely make people who are not familiar with site mechanisms think that this hiding is preventing you from doing either. The same goes for various comparisons made by kos as well - the way these answers are written, it's as if the posts are being deleted, instead of merely being hidden from literally one page on the entire website.
    – muru
    Commented Sep 29 at 19:03
  • As for naturally scrolling off, I don't see what benefit such posts gain from that limelight while so waiting - as I have noted, the tendency is generally for downvotes to pile on, so are you saying you'd like to encourage heavy downvoting of such posts even further?
    – muru
    Commented Sep 29 at 19:05
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Some numbers:

  • There are (at present) 5,857 questions on Meta AU.
  • Of these, 68 questions have a score of -8 or less.
  • So, historically, ~1.16% of posts would have been affected by this change.
  • At the moment, I see 47 posts on the homepage (odd number, that), the last entry having been modified on Feb 27, 2024.

So right now posts are sticking around on the home page for over 6 months. How many of those 68 questions can we make a good case for keeping around on the homepage for that long? If people need to be notified of anything, the corresponding post should be so that people on main see it in the sidebar.

Otherwise, hiding these handful of questions from the homepage (after a fairly high number of users have acted on them) means other questions that are more worthy of our attention on Meta get more time in the spotlight. This isn't censorship by any means, it's just not showing eyesores front and centre.

(If anything, people tend to pile on downvotes, and the people who posted these often get even more annoyed as a result. If keeping these out of the homepage reduces the pile-ons, I'd say we'd be making the place less hostile and more welcoming.)

To make some things clear, this feature only hides eligible posts on exactly one page:

  1. The page that you see when you go to Https://meta.askubuntu.com

Posts continue to be visible (until actually deleted by users, moderators or automations) in:

  • https://meta.askubuntu.com/questions
  • the posters' profiles, including those or posters of answers to such questions
  • the tag pages of the tags associated with these posts
  • search results for relevant terms
  • anywhere else such posts might have shown up

And such posts can continue to be voted on unless other mechanisms such as locks have been applied. Meta does not have reputation in the usual sense, so this does not affect the posters' reputations, except of course when these posts refer to posts on the main Ask Ubuntu website (and even then, the "meta effect" is well-known to cause problematic pile-ons to referenced posts, so mitigating this is a bonus).

This is analogous to removing problematic posts from the HNQ - something which was long requested for and only added after SE got bad publicity from certain HNQ selections. Sadly while the mechanisms added for the HNQ are more fine-grained, this feature is a lot older and lot coarser. Of anything, we should be asking for more manual control of this feature instead of blindly turning it off.

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