Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!
Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.
Comments on Why did my question get a downvote?
Parent
Why did my question get a downvote?
Currently, there is no consensus about whether to provide tooltips for the voting buttons (especially the downvote one). However, the community now includes quite a lot of questions that attracted downvotes and sometimes this created long debates in comments and flagging.
I would like for us to define a few answers for the "Why did my question get a downvote?".
This should help us in providing a reference to a downvote reason, if one "standard" one is appropriate.
Post
I believe this should be answered by the downvoters on a case by case basis. Only they know the particular reason they downvoted that particular question.
I am not a fan of canned feedback, because it often is overly generic and subject to interpretation. Often, more concrete feedback is both clearer and more useful.
For instance, consider this example:
The question shows too little research effort. Showing your work is important because ...
versus
Isn't this answered by the Wikipedia article on data compression?
The generic feedback leaves OP in the lurch, because it doesn't tell him where he should have searched.
0 comment threads