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I just gave an upvote to a question on meta because I think it is a valuable question to ask.

Upvotes/Downvotes on questions should not be about whether you agree/disagree with the position expressed by the questioner, nor as a yes/no to the question title.

Assent/Dissent belongs in the answers and votes on the answers.

Right?

[Note: I don't think we on meta.music.SE are particularly prone to using question votes in the wrong way, but I felt it was important to qualify my upvote. And it seemed more useful to say this in a separate post rather than a comment on that question.]

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    This is the opposite of how meta voting is typically viewed. The main site is very quality focused, but meta a lot of voting is I approve or I disapprove. For example one of the famous meta questions on every meta is voting for a chat room. Highest vote gets to be the name.
    – Dom Mod
    Dec 4, 2019 at 20:15
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    Highest voted answer, surely?
    – luser droog
    Dec 4, 2019 at 22:45
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    The meta.SO faq suggests that voting means agree/disagree only for questions tagged feature-request.
    – luser droog
    Dec 4, 2019 at 22:54
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    I disagree, so I'm downvoting ;)
    – Bob says reinstate Monica
    Dec 8, 2019 at 18:43

2 Answers 2

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I want to highlight @luser droog's OP comment. Downvoting in the meta because you disagree with a topic or answer should only be for feature-requests.

from https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-meta

Voting is different on meta. Like normal Stack Exchange sites, Meta allows members to vote on questions and answers. For most posts, votes reflect the perceived usefulness: well-written, well-reasoned, well-researched posts tend to get more attention and more upvotes. Highly-voted and frequently-linked posts may become part of the community-curated FAQ or codified as part of the site’s Help pages.

Unlike normal Stack Exchange sites, Meta invites the community to discuss, debate and propose changes to the way the community itself behaves, as well as how the software itself works. On posts tagged feature-request, voting indicates agreement or disagreement with the proposed change rather than just the quality or usefulness of the post itself.

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The slow-motion trainwreck — MonicaGate — evolving on MSE has many factors, mostly remote from this one...

...Except this one!

Here is a comment by rockwalrus to bobobobo expressing that pithily though I've seen it expressed many times.

I personally dont think any informal FAQ-ing will prevent this tear from happening. To wit

As the number of people discussing a question goes up with content+agreement coalesced into one vote, it will invariably happen that

  • two people that seem to be in opposition would be found to actually agree
  • two people that seemingly concur by voting in the same direction would be found to be in violent disagreement

Scale up to full-SE-network and we get the astronomical bedlam to content ratio that is playing out on MSE.

If we don't want to go that-a-way 2-dimensional voting needs to be incorporated at the system level itself.

Ie one should be able to say I disagree with your view and heartily thank you for expressing it

tl;dr

There is a limit to the strain between de-facto and de-jure that any system can withstand.

PS
Ironically (or not) I've upvoted this not because I agree with luser droogs view but because this is an important question for SE style fora

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  • I didn't consider my post within that context, but perhaps I ought to have done so. Really, I was just thinking about posts of mine like this one where I felt bullied for asking what I thought was a reasonable question.
    – luser droog
    Dec 5, 2019 at 7:27
  • @luserdroog O stackoverflow itself is a different train wreck from the current mess. When the only metric of quality that stands is "fastest gun in the west" we've gone way... way past the point of diminishing returns
    – Rusi
    Dec 5, 2019 at 7:31
  • Hmm. A lot to think about. I don't have any idea how to solve the political part, but from a technical side maybe we should have two categories of votes: quality and interest.
    – luser droog
    Dec 5, 2019 at 7:40

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