Timeline for Do we use the downvote button more than other sites?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
23 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jan 20, 2021 at 7:31 | comment | added | Francesco Polizzi | @MartinSleziak: About this I agree, but the chat is not the first environment that a newcomer on MO sees. Surely, the very active users can have a more complete experience on the site. | |
| Jan 20, 2021 at 7:06 | comment | added | Martin Sleziak | @FrancescoPolizzi Of course, there is also chat associated with MO. In chat, many things which would be off-topic on the Q&A site are perfectly fine, so if somebody needs a place to socialize, chat would be a reasonable choice. (If I look at Homotopy Theory - which is currently the most active chatroom associated with MO - I'd guess that at least the most active users probably know each other a bit by now, having posted thousands of messages there. | |
| Jan 20, 2021 at 6:58 | comment | added | David Roberts Mod | @FrancescoPolizzi I may have a broader definition of what counts as a human relationship, then. I don't disagree that the types of professional relationships one can build on MO are different to ones that revolve around pictures of family and so on. | |
| Jan 20, 2021 at 6:20 | comment | added | Francesco Polizzi | @DavidRoberts: It seems to me evident that, since all the discussions in MO outside Mathematics are in general considered off-topic, it is very difficult to create human relationships in the usual sense. To have these, one should share some details of his private life, that is common on Facebook and Twitter, but not at all on MO. I do not see any bias in this, it is just a plain observation. With this I am not saying that MO is better or worse than Twitter, I am just saying that it is structurally different. | |
| Jan 20, 2021 at 6:10 | comment | added | Alec Rhea | @DavidRoberts I like the idea of an unspoken agreement along those lines, consider me in. | |
| Jan 20, 2021 at 6:08 | comment | added | Alec Rhea | @HarryGindi I never said MO had a problem, only that there was perceived unwelcomeness; wether that is a problem is I think still up for debate, although I agree (if this is what you're saying) that I'm leaning towards this perception being a potential problem moving into the future. Who are these malice filled people? If you don't want to make allegations publicly I understand, but I'm still curious to hear your take -- my email (that I post publicly) is alecrhea at yahoo if you'd like to message me privately. | |
| Jan 20, 2021 at 5:00 | comment | added | Harry Gindi | Alec, maybe the problem with MO is that people are spreading nasty untrue rumours about us and telling undergrads not to come here. I wouldn't put it past some people that they'd do it out of pure malice. ='[ | |
| Jan 20, 2021 at 3:30 | comment | added | David Roberts Mod | Here's something I have observed more recently: it used to be that an obviously off-topic, but mathematically-sensible question (say an undergrad question), would get a single downvote. This I believe has the effect of keeping it off the front page, and there seemed to be an unspoken "gentleman's agreement" that it wouldn't be downvoted past a score of -1. These days I am seeing such questions more often get a score of -2 and -3. It's only a small thing, but it shows a shift in user base who (understandably) never got the non-existent memo. | |
| Jan 19, 2021 at 23:54 | comment | added | David Roberts Mod | " the platform permits the creation of human relationships. I am afraid that MO platform is really too limited for this" <-- lol, what? Also, the comment generally displays a sample bias. | |
| Jan 19, 2021 at 21:47 | comment | added | Martin Sleziak | From one of your comments it seems that you might be also interested in differences in down-voting between various tags. I'd guess that various data related to this could be obtained from SEDE, too. I will at least point out that there is this question on Meta Stack Exchange: Which tag has the highest incidence of downvoting? Glorfindel posted there an answer with a query which looks at various tag and the percentage of questions which have at least one downvote: data.stackexchange.com/mathoverflow/query/828585/… | |
| Jan 19, 2021 at 21:23 | comment | added | Francesco Polizzi | @AlecRhea: I do not know. In my experience, I certainly saw people complain about the "un-friedliness" or the "lack of empathy" on MO. I have the impression that this is not really related (only) to the downvotes, but rather to the structure of the QA-platform, much less suitable than others to generate human warmth. As a matter of fact, I have also in mind people complaining after their question was well-received, because they did not like the tone of the answer (that was polite, but cold, so it could appear as dismissive). | |
| Jan 19, 2021 at 20:35 | comment | added | Alec Rhea | @SamHopkins No worries, just a miscommunication. Yes, I agree that finding out which metrics to look at is tricky business and we might not be able to glean any hard answers, but I'm just trying to find some objective metric of this perceived unfriendliness as a starting point for a larger discussion that is hopefully more solid than 'a lot of people have been saying lately'. | |
| Jan 19, 2021 at 20:33 | comment | added | Sam Hopkins | @AlecRhea: Sorry, I didn't mean to attribute any viewpoints to you that you did not express. What I meant was I'm not sure numbers concerning downvotes overall tell us a lot, because of how these votes are mostly used to do basic quality control. But I do believe that aggressive downvoting against questions at the e.g. graduate level posed in good faith is potentially an important contributing factor to the perceived unwelcoming nature of MO and that's worth discussing. I now realize that comments under the answers also discussed whether the overall downvote numbers are telling us much. | |
| Jan 19, 2021 at 20:30 | comment | added | Alec Rhea | @FrancescoPolizzi My two favorite undergraduate professors, an algebraist and analyst by trade, both expressed a similar sentiment to me that MO was unwelcoming and I should be careful coming here; the algebraist was younger, but the analyst was in his 60's. I hope they don't fit your description of "Facebook, Reddit or Twitter" people that are trying to use MO wrong. | |
| Jan 19, 2021 at 20:27 | comment | added | Alec Rhea | @SamHopkins I’m not sure what the ‘premise of my question is’ besides a request for data; if you mean that you disagree with my instincts, that is fine. You seem to work in fields that are widely respected by mathematicians at large, combinatorics/representation theory/algebraic geometry. As someone who posts primarily category theory stuff (lately), I’ve had downvotes almost instantly on questions that ended up more than 5 positive once seen by a larger crowd. I actually inquired about this on meta, and was told by a mod that there are suspected serial downvoters for certain topics. | |
| Jan 19, 2021 at 18:37 | comment | added | Francesco Polizzi | I more or less agree. My impression is that MO is perceived as "un-welcoming" mainly by some people whose experience is mostly on social media like Facebook, Reddit or Twitter, where the platform permits the creation of human relationships. I am afraid that MO platform is really too limited for this, and that there is no obvious way to wipe out the cultural divide. | |
| Jan 19, 2021 at 16:31 | comment | added | Sam Hopkins | I'm a bit skeptical about the premise of this question. Just based on my own observations, I would guess that by far most down votes are cast on questions clearly outside of the scope of MO (e.g. undergraduate homework exercises from textbooks), and these actions have little to do with whether MO is perceived as welcoming to the kind of mathematicians we would want to engage with the site but are currently off-put by its culture. | |
| Jan 19, 2021 at 13:52 | history | became hot meta post | |||
| Jan 19, 2021 at 12:56 | vote | accept | Alec Rhea | ||
| Jan 19, 2021 at 11:42 | answer | added | Martin Sleziak | timeline score: 9 | |
| Jan 19, 2021 at 11:28 | history | edited | Alec Rhea |
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| Jan 19, 2021 at 11:26 | answer | added | Glorfindel | timeline score: 28 | |
| Jan 19, 2021 at 10:55 | history | asked | Alec Rhea | CC BY-SA 4.0 |