I joined 1 or 2 weeks before and i have observed here that people prefer to downvote rather than just making an asker understand the fault in his question . Well , i agree that downvoting must exist in answers , so that every get asker gets the best reliable answer but voting on an question may mislead a random searcher into thinking that votes is the quality of an question. For example we have a millions of questions asking the same thing "why does law of conservation of momentum hold true" , but every single question gets the different votes. This system is really misleading.It would be better if there was a vote of wrong concepts involved only in the post (not right concepts involved because it would again led a system of favoritisized questions) .So should it work the other way or not ?
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4$\begingroup$ "Voting on an question may mislead a random searcher into thinking that votes is the quality of an question"...that is precisely what votes are supposed to be. $\endgroup$– ACuriousMind ModCommented Jan 29, 2016 at 13:57
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2$\begingroup$ Also, the feature of downvotes has been discussed to death in all its forms, see the tag on meta.SE and well as on this meta. $\endgroup$– ACuriousMind ModCommented Jan 29, 2016 at 13:58
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2$\begingroup$ Perhaps this one is the most relevant. And about your view that similar questions get very different votes, that is to some extent true because users don't see all questions, particularly if you compare old questions to new ones. That said, when you have a large enough community the voting should normalize to the same trends, even if the same set of users doesn't vote on them all. $\endgroup$– tpg2114Commented Jan 29, 2016 at 14:16
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1$\begingroup$ "I joined 1 or 2 weeks before and i" now consider myself an authority on the culture here? $\endgroup$– Alfred CentauriCommented Feb 2, 2016 at 2:38
1 Answer
Voting on questions isn't perfect, sure, but the fact is, we do get a lot of bad questions. Sometimes they come from people cheating on their homework, sometimes they come from people who don't know the first thing about physics but are convinced they have disproven relativity, sometimes they come from ordinary curious people and they're just really trivial questions where the asker couldn't be bothered to do a simple Google search to find the answer first. And so on.
We need some way to distinguish bad questions from good ones, because part of what attracts people to this site is that they can come to read and answer good questions. That's why voting on questions exists. Again, we know it's not a perfect system, but nobody has an idea that's much better.
This is why we are fine with the system the way it is.
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1$\begingroup$ people with reputation more than 125, may even delibrately downvote your post , and downvoting is good for answers and not for questions. for example you can downvote posts of any person and not let him survive here $\endgroup$ Commented Feb 2, 2016 at 4:19
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3$\begingroup$ "may even delibrately downvote your post" - down-voting ought to be deliberate, as opposed to accidental, don't you think? $\endgroup$ Commented Feb 4, 2016 at 2:21
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1$\begingroup$ @David Z this system isnt present however in google , and still google gives excellent results for the information we try to search in it ! $\endgroup$ Commented Feb 5, 2016 at 14:07