I have a suggestion

Often, people down vote answers on questions where they themselves answered, just so their own answer is further on top. This has nothing to do with the answer being bad, so it's considered strategically down voting.

Sometimes they remove their down votes as long as they can, but if their own answer receives enough reputation, they don't, leaving a good answer with minus score.

I've seen lots of questions with one positive score answer and a lot of other answers, all of them with -1 score. Now who would think that the user who answered with the positive score would be the one down voting the others, hm?


my suggestion is that down voting answers on questions where you put an answer should give you much more than just -1 score.

After all, solving programming problems should be a peaceful thing, not some life/death competition sort of thing.

  • 19
    You're assigning malice without evidence, and penalizing legitimate downvotes. – Dave Newton Dec 5 '15 at 15:41
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    On one occasion I indeed downvoted every existing answer before adding my own. All other answers were dead wrong. Do you have any contingency plan for such a situation? – usr2564301 Dec 5 '15 at 15:41
  • @DaveNewton & Jongware: There might be some situations, but from my perspective, these are rare. More likely it's just strategic down voting. And even this particular term makes me vomit. – bytecode77 Dec 5 '15 at 15:43
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    "More likely it's just strategic down voting" - and this is based on what data? – Paul Roub Dec 5 '15 at 16:03
  • @PaulRoub Just on my assumption. You can disagree with me on that, but that's my statement and I'll stick to it! – bytecode77 Dec 5 '15 at 16:12
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    @bytecode77 Not agreeing or disagreeing with your assumption -- like you, I can't back it up either way. I'm disagreeing that there should be changes made based on either of our guesses. – Paul Roub Dec 5 '15 at 16:13
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    @bytecode77 How do you know it's "more likely" to be tactical downvoting? Again: you're assigning malice and chicanery to SO citizens which I suspect happens less than you might think. – Dave Newton Dec 5 '15 at 17:33
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    Downvoting competing answers to a question you've also answered, if those other answers are good, isn't even an effective way to increase the rep you get. Downvoting it is simply likely to attract more pity upvotes that will end up over-compensating for the downvotes. It's also very likely to result in the other answerer(s) to downvote the one un-downvoted answer (regardless of how good it is) in response. Tactical downvoting, as described here, is exceedingly rare in my experiences, precisely because it's so rarely even effective at its goal, and is frequently counter productive. – Servy Dec 5 '15 at 17:44
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    "not some life/death competition sort of thing." You seem to be taking rep far too seriously. "I've seen lots of questions with one positive score answer and a lot of other answers" Analyze the collection you've gathered, then, and post it so the rest of us can see, too. – Josh Caswell Dec 5 '15 at 19:13

An example with a single positively-scored answer and multiple negatively-scored answers could be a case of successful tactical downvoting, yes … or it could simply be that those other answers were lousy. I have certainly seen the latter on multiple occasions (and sometimes even had the positively-scored answer), and I'm not sure I've ever seen the former. So we need more data.

Ideally, we'd use full-on statistics gained somehow from all questions, but that's likely to be impractical, so I think simply burning through a hundred or so questions that fit the pattern and listing the examples of clear tactical downvoting along with the examples where it's unclear (or is in fact clear that it's merit-based voting). But without at least some reasonable sample, this is just guessing. Making significant tradeoffs (like this) based on guesses is not sensible.


Those who are most aware of the question and other answers, and also who are most informed of the 'correct' answer, are those are best able to provide their own answer and (likely/possibly) downvote alternatives.

I.e., the ppl who downvote are the ppl who have invested enough in understanding/ thinking about the question to answer it themselves.

That's a conjecture hypothesis, but it's a simple heuristic for the positive correlation between probability of dolling out downvote and providing an answer.

I see where you're coming from, but it requires a lot of big assumptions to make it a sound feature, right?

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    In fact its likely that someone comes across a question with a bunch of awful answers, and besides downvoting the awful ones, decides to write one of his own to not leave the asker hanging with bad answers. – Magisch Dec 9 '15 at 7:09

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