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Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

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Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#3
I've got the most downvoted Emacs question. It was actually even more downvoted at one point.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11706028/creating-a-elisp...

It was a pretty good question but I got into a debate with a moderator. That was my last question and I did a rage quit.

As you can see it was a simple well-defined question, and it produced two good answers.

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#5
post #3

I've got the most downvoted Emacs question. It was actually even more downvoted at one point. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11706028/creating-a-elisp... It was a pretty good question but I got into a debate with a moderator. That was my last question and I did a rage quit. As you can see it was a simple well-defined question, and it produced two good answers.

Is there any kind of Stack facility for complaining about the quality of moderation? Because the moderation here is so clearly wrong that I'm not sure the people who made that call should have posting privileges on the site, let alone moderation.

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#6
I was expecting horrible questions, basically spam. Nope, these are real and legitimate questions and I don't see why most of these were downvoted. I wonder what the data looks like beyond just some of the worst questions, and whether the trend is going to be more and more "legitimate questions that are either 'obvious' or already answered get downvoted." If so, that cannot be a good thing.

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#8

I was expecting horrible questions, basically spam. Nope, these are real and legitimate questions and I don't see why most of these were downvoted. I wonder what the data looks like beyond just some of the worst questions, and whether the trend is going to be more and more "legitimate questions that are either 'obvious' or already answered get downvoted." If so, that cannot be a good thing.

The actual spam and completely incoherent questions are deleted. So what you're left with is things that are actually legitimate questions, so don't merit admins intervening and deleting, but which touch a nerve in some other way; like people asking about how to send out large volumes of (presumably) unsolicited email, people asking homework questions, and the like.

Also, note that some of these "most downvoted questions" are also among the most upvoted as well, having very large positive scores, like https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1642028/what-is-the-name.... Once a question becomes famous enough, there are likely to be a number of contrarians who don't like it and downvote it, and eventually that can add up.

And then if you look in the comments of some of them, that seems to be not too bad but which have more downvotes than you'd expect, they got a downvote brigade because they complained about a few downvotes on meta. Pretty lame that people do that, but it happens.

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#9
post #3

I've got the most downvoted Emacs question. It was actually even more downvoted at one point. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11706028/creating-a-elisp... It was a pretty good question but I got into a debate with a moderator. That was my last question and I did a rage quit. As you can see it was a simple well-defined question, and it produced two good answers.

> It was a pretty good question

No, this is not a good question for StackOverflow. You simply asked for someone to write code for you, which is not what StackOverflow is intended to be for. It is intended for help on a particular specific problem you are having with your own code.

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#10
post #5
post #3

I've got the most downvoted Emacs question. It was actually even more downvoted at one point. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11706028/creating-a-elisp... It was a pretty good question but I got into a debate with a moderator. That was my last question and I did a rage quit. As you can see it was a simple well-defined question, and it produced two good answers.

Is there any kind of Stack facility for complaining about the quality of moderation? Because the moderation here is so clearly wrong that I'm not sure the people who made that call should have posting privileges on the site, let alone moderation.

Actually, that's exactly the kind of question that StackOverflow wants to discourage; people just using it as requests for someone else to write their code for them.
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