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Question

I first noticed it when it happened to me. Then I noticed that it's happening to a lot of people. Questions are frequently getting downvoted without the downvoters indicating their reasons.

The GenAI Stack Exchange community is still new, hence its contributors are new. We don't want to immediately drive them away. The environment isn't exactly inviting participation when the people letting you know they don't like what you have to say can't be bothered to drop a comment indicating what could be improved.

If I dare to speculate, one contributing factor could be readers' expectations. GenAI is a broad subject that everyone is curious about right now, and there are lots of non-technical questions being asked - which is fine! Questions don't need to be technical, but they should be answerable and on-point, and hopefully practical to others beyond the individual asking. Individuals coming from a more technical background might think that some of the non-technical questions being asked are simplistic.

I take the view that a question attempting to solve a real-world problem, as long as it is answerable in scope, and shows some effort and research by the contributor, is most likely a valid question. If it's not a good question, we can let the author of that question know - politely. If it's almost there, but coming up a little short, why not offer a suggestion to bring it up to par?

Besides the obvious step of offering constructive feedback when we feel a question is lacking, how can we encourage others to do the same in order to set a positive and inclusive tone for this still budding and malleable community?

Answer 1

Downvotes, just like upvotes, have a purpose on stackexchange sites... especially for new communities.

This site was launched after having been discussed for a month in a private team where they were supposed to decide the direction of the site, determining what is and isn't on topic and what kinds of questions should be asked. Whether or not any real consensus was reached within that private team is mostly unknown, given nothing left it and the help center was never updated to reflect what is and isn't on topic here. Absent any guidance, the only tools the community has to set the direction of the site is through voting... which includes close votes/flags and both up and down votes, however it is heavily skewed toward upvotes due to the much higher reputation requirement for downvotes and close votes. The site will always have far more upvotes than downvotes for this reason.

I do agree that constructive criticism via comments is important, but they shouldn't be a replacement for votes. Downvotes are the only tool the general community has easy access to for having a post that is a poor addition to the network deleted.

Answer 2

Tecnhically there are more people able to provide feedback than downvoting. Remember that comment anywhere and vote down are privileges.

According to Comment everywhere, comments requires at least 50 reputation and according to Vote down, downvoting requires at least 125 reputation.

When downvotes without feedback have discussed on some other sites, people have argued many reasons for not providing feedback like

1. Fear to revenge downvoting.
2. Not willing to engage in discussions.
3. Doesn't belive that the question creator will be able to fix/improve the question.
4. etc.

I think that rather than focusing on downvotes without feeback, it might be better to encourage participation, specially encourage posting high quality questions and answers.

AFAIK there are very few things that we can do, specially to related to seasoned users to encourage them to always leave a comment when they downvote a post. Participating on Meta is one of them.

Answer 3

What to do about a large number of downvotes without feedback?

Sadly, there is nothing we can do. Downvoters can do pretty much anything they want on SE given the current SE policy+design. The only thing they can't do is having a very clear pattern of serial downvoting (and even that is not that much enforced). It's just one of the downsides of using SE, and that's one more reason to prefer ChatGPT and other SE replacements. To limit the ravage caused by a large number of downvotes, I recommend making Roomba less destructive.

Answer 4

I am not giving these downvotes (I bountied a question early on in the site's history and do not have enough rep to downvote or comment).

That said, I strongly believe that if a question or answer is bad, it should be downvoted. Not all "valid" questions deserve upvotes or neutral votes. If it is not-in-scope, it should be migrated or closed. If it is unanswerable, it should be closed and the asker can reopen it by making it answerable. But between "doesn't belong on the site" and "a good question" there's a wide gulf in quality. In particular, I think the following types of questions often deserve downvotes at the minimum, and potentially closure:

• "What's the best..."
• Questions that ought to be broken down into 3+ subtasks.
• Questions where the answer is "GenAI is not capable of this, and furthermore it's probably mathematically undecidable".
• Questions where the answer is "You are likely to end up with a jail sentence or dead if you try to put your trust in any GenAI answer to this question, please consult a human professional or conventional software solutions".
• Questions that pretend to be tool-agnostic when they aren't. It'd be like asking "How do I remove an object from a list?" on StackOverflow.
• Questions that could only ever be useful to one person. (Nothing against niche questions, but e.g. trying to generate a particular subject matter with Midjourney is not a "good" SE question.)

This is true regardless of the average quality of questions or answers on a site. If all the questions and answers on a site get downvotes, poor answers, or are closed, well, maybe that's an indication that the site was poorly conceived. (It is.)