I'll start by saying that I don't know if my proposal is good or not, I'll expose my pro & cons arguments (this isn't a feature request, just a discussion).
Simple math (that you know already):
- upvoting a question: +5 for OP
- downvoting a question: -2 for OP
but
- upvoting an answer: +10 for Answerer
- downvoting an answer: -2 for Answerer
That doesn't seem very proportionate at first glance. The reputation points gain/loss between users disapproving and/or approving the post is different between questions and answers.
That seems pretty balanced for questions. The question is okay, someone upvotes it, someone sees an issue and downvotes, the asker still get reputation. Someone else sees an issue, downvotes, there is still 1 point left. A third user downvotes: now a question with a -2 score is costing the user 1 rep point. Good.
But for answers (as many of us know how easy it is to get a first upvote from a gullible user, or the OP, happy to see an answer), undoing the reputation gain, forcing the answerer to edit or delete their post, is much harder:
- upvote: 10 points
- downvote: 8 points
- downvote: 6 points
- downvote: 4 points
- downvote: 2 points
The answer has a score of -3 but still gives reputation to the poster. And there are bad answers that luckily gathered 3 votes before someone notices that it's wrong. You make the count! Most people just give up downvoting in those cases.
Proposal
I'm proposing that downvoting an answer should cost 4 points to its poster instead of 2.
Pros:
- Answerers are more compelled to delete their answers, because the score is negative after 3 downvotes.
- The up/down vote ratio is the same as the one for questions.
- You cannot (theorically) flag a wrong answer to put it in the review queue so it's difficult to be followed by a mob of downvoters for a wrong (not bad or LQ) answer, but downvotes have more power to coerce the poster to delete their answer.
Cons:
- Why do this when power users can vote to delete the answer when the score is -1 or less? (Well, it's not so easy to reach 3 votes to delete)
- Why do this when there's still a penalty for the badges? (if I'm running for gold badge, I'll delete posts that hurt my tag badge score without caring for reputation), so high reputation users running for badges would have deleted the answer anyway
- This would reduce the reputation points of most users (but statistically the same for everyone, I personally NEVER keep answers with a negative score, even if it still gets me points).
- The reputation count will have to be recomputed for all users unless the measure could be made non-retroactive, which would probably be better but more complex. (It has already probably been done when downvoting questions ceased to cost reputation, I dunno, wasn't there at the time).
I was surprised that noone proposed it already. I (of course) searched all over the internet (and beyond :)) and found nothing like this, so I'm waiting for your 0-point penalty meta upvotes & downvotes as well as your input.
