Compared to other Stack Exchange sites, there aren't many downvotes or flags here. I can think of one reason: we have such a small community of regulars, and many of us may be hesitant to give offense, especially because downvotes are not entirely anonymous; it's often possible to make good guesses about who did it. But that may not be the only factor involved. Are there other reasons?
So what purposes do downvotes and flags serve, and should we encourage more?
I participate in larger SE sites, and I have clearly seen how helpful downvotes are there. Authors of questions and answers get immediate feedback of what the community thinks of the post compared to other questions and answers. Newbies who post half-authoritative answers to "test the waters" get quick and honest feedback, and are often pointed in the right direction; those who do more than just lurk either learn the rules and become useful members of the community, or they leave or are forced out. Larger SE sites have plenty of users, and lots of questions are asked every day.
Our site is, well, different. I think of it as semi-functional. First, our subject matter, amateur radio, is in many ways a mature technology that is past its golden age. That's the narrow view. The broader view is that amateur radio is a broad pursuit and subject matter, and there are many interesting facets to participate in or learn about. Unfortunately many of ham radio's sub-communities are badly represented here, as evidenced by the questions asked in the last year or two. For instance I haven't seen many questions about contesting, QRP construction, VHF/UHF, satellites, VLF, DXing, etc. In many cases we have experts on such subjects in our community, but the questions just don't come in very often. It was not always thus; in the early days of the site, questions about these subjects were more common, and attracted many answers and vigorous discussions. It seems that once the "low-hanging fruit" were plucked during the site's early days, most of those users left.
The Area 51 statistics for the site back me up that something's not quite functional about our site: we have lots of users and visits, but not many questions or answers.
But it's not all bad news. We have a decent-size community of people that check in regularly or semi-regularly, including many astonishingly well-qualified experts, and the basic subjects such as electronics and antennas are quite well covered. Some sub-communities are well represented: ask a question about SDR here, and you are sure to get an expert answer.
So if our site is not exactly like the bigger SE sites that are healthy in every way, should it operate the same as the bigger sites? I believe @webmarc's answer makes the point that it's OK if we don't downvote questions and answers as vigorously as the larger sites, and I think I agree with him.
In particular I personally try to not scare off the newbies, because we could use more participation, and any improvement in the small fraction of new users that hang around for more than a post or two could help. So rather than downvote a newbie's half-baked question or answer, I will often try to write a comment with constructive feedback. Unfortunately I don't think my efforts have helped much, but I'll likely keep trying.
I can think of an instance when an answer clearly merits a downvote, whether written by a confused newbie or not: when it is factually incorrect. We don't want to see misinformation propagating here.
(My understanding of best practices here is evolving, and my opinion may well change in the future.)
After I wrote the below, I realized I didn't answer explicitly: I don't think the low volume of downvotes is a problem or something that needs active "fixing;" below is the meandering stream of consciousness that's behind this perspective.
And after further contemplation, perhaps additional focus should be on upvoting correct answers, and creating correct answers where there are none. The singular focus on downvotes is ... distasteful? negative? not constructive? in a community context.
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I think that we probably have lower question volume than other stack exchange sites. In no particular order, and selected from some of the other SE sites I like to check out (so, you know, NOT scientific at all):
And on Ham: 3,827 questions.
If a question or answer is just awful and unfixable, it typically gets a flag for closure or removal... even better than a downvote IMO.
Since the purpose of voting is to help differentiate the relative value of questions and answers, I think we're probably ok. If we had a greater volume of questions — this week's volume is 7 questions so far on a Friday afternoon EDT — then maybe encouraging more downvote activity might be more helpful to differentiate the questions.
As it stands, I think answer score in particular is only helpful for those cases where there are several answers attached to a particular question.
BTW, from a scientific or data-based perspective, it'd be REALLY interesting to do a study relating vote volume to either question volume or community size.
If a question or answer is just awful and unfixable, it typically gets a flag for closure or removal... even better than a downvote IMO.
Downvotes can be more important as flags. In fact:
As explained here in the relevant help page:
Why is voting important?
Voting is central to our model of providing quality questions and answers; it is how …
- good content rises to the top
- incorrect content falls to the bottom
- users who consistently provide useful content accrue reputation and are granted more privileges on the site
It’s only through voting that a class of editors, closers, and moderators can emerge to help run and govern the site. Voting is how site leadership forms. That’s why the reputation leagues show a breakdown of top users by reputation for the week, month, quarter, year, or all time.
Our sites are all intended to be a sort of representative democracy. ... but voting on questions and answers is the primary mechanism through which the community governs the site on a day to day basis. ...
Voting is so important that there is a variety of badges associated with different aspects of voting – like casting your first upvote or downvote, ...
Voting up a question or answer signals to the rest of the community that a post is interesting, well-researched, and useful, while voting down a post signals the opposite: that the post contains wrong information, is poorly researched, or fails to communicate information. The more that people vote on a post, the more certain future visitors can be of the quality of information contained within that post – not to mention that upvotes are a great way to thank the author of a good post for the time and effort put into writing it!
This is not to say that flags are not important.
A Theory of Moderation, while important, simply doesn't go far enough in explaining why.
Entire text at https://ham.stackexchange.com/help/why-vote
Active, Oldest, or Votes in the box between the question and its answers. I think the default is "Votes", which makes downvoted answers bubble down, but results are probably different for "Active" or "Oldest".
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Commented
Jun 30, 2021 at 18:32