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I recently replied to a question and I was expecting some pushback, fair game.

I then realized, after having forgotten this after the change some years back, that the downvote is labelled as "This answer is not useful".

I would be interested in the meta comments (or explanation) of what this mean in SE Academia, and specifically:

  • "I do not agree"
  • "this answer is factually wrong"
  • "this answer should not have visibility" (for other reasons)
  • or something else.

In places such as StackOverflow, there may be a "factually correct" answer (note that the downvotes there are magnitude worse than here - this is just an example) - say whether GOTO END exists in Python.

In SE Academia, there are also answers that are factually wrong ("In order to send a paper to Annals of Physics, you must bring them through a pigeon"). There are also other one may not agree with (sometimes vehemently), but this does not make them incorrect or not useful.

Was there at some point a consensus about downvoting in this community?

Note that I used my answer simply as an example, it just reminded me about this point I saw with other answers before. As for the downvotes, I am about 35 years past the time I could care about Internet Fame Points :) -- so this is really not about getting acceptance but rather to see if SE Academia transpires some of its ideas into this community.

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I've also wondered about the phrasing. Some downvotes are, according to comments of the voter, based on very narrow grounds, rather than an overall assessment. Even misspellings in extreme cases when the writer isn't a native speaker. An answer can certainly be "useful" even when I disagree with it.

I have a personal standard for downvoting answers. If I believe that the OP or others would be somehow damaged or harmed by accepting the answer and acting on it, I will downvote. Otherwise I'll let it go even if I disagree. "This answer is dangerous." I don't expect a lot of people here to agree with that standard, however. An example would be an answer suggesting a fight with one's advisor or PI.

I've noticed a few instances of people downvoting an existing answer as part of giving their own. That worries me a bit.

I very seldom downvote questions and very (very) often wonder why downvotes are given on them. Sometimes it seems that the voter just doesn't think the question needs to be answered and that the answers should be obvious to the OP. But that is a different issue.

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    Fwiw, "If I believe that the OP would be somehow damaged by accepting the answer and acting on it, I will downvote. Otherwise I'll let it go even if I disagree." is also the standard I use when voting on answers, though not just OP but also anyone else finding the Q&A through search. An answer that would lead to harm is certainly "not useful", or at least "not positively useful". Commented Feb 10, 2025 at 17:38
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    "I've noticed a few instances of people downvoting an existing answer as part of giving their own." I’m regularly in the situation of writing an answer precisely because I found none of the existing answers to be useful. (Though it’s worth mentioning that this happens much less often on this stack than on others.) Commented Feb 11, 2025 at 14:57
  • Not sure whether this is contained in you 'dangerous answers' but I also downvote answers that are objectively wrong. There are lots of questions and answers where objectively right or wrong cannot be meaningfully assigned but in answers where this decision can be made and that are wrong a downvote is justified for me. Generally combined with a comment explaining why it is wrong. Commented Mar 5, 2025 at 12:26
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To your question:

Was there at some point a consensus about downvoting in this community?

I've been around for a good chunk of years now, and to my knowledge there has never been a substantive discussion raised on this question. Perhaps there is something around in the bowels of meta. To further elaborate, however, I don't think there has ever been a systemic issue with voting acute enough to require an explicit consensus. This is not to be dismissive of your question-- it's reasonable enough to have gotten some downvotes unexpectedly and wonder why it happened.

As a matter of the community's dynamic-- we're relatively small and relatively low volume. Downvotes are also proportionately rare. Clicking through several questions currently on the stack's front page, I'd estimate (admitting to being less than fully systematic) that at most 1% of the votes cast on answers are downvotes. For questions which do not get put on the Hot Network Questions list, answer visibility can be almost entirely controlled by upvotes or not voting.

I'd also comment that the meaning of votes, or at least standards, may become a bit different on questions which do hit HNQ. That's the case for the question you answered, as an example.

HNQ does some weird things to this Stack generally. The increased attention on a question, together with the fact that upvoting is more accessible than downvoting, lead HNQ questions and their answers to a much higher risk of weak answers getting upvoted for less than ideal reasons. Put more bluntly: HNQ votes often become popularity contests rather than reflecting quality or usefulness.

So for my part, and I suspect this may be shared by other regulars: My quality standards for downvoting both answers and questions on the HNQ are significantly lower than otherwise. If an answer seems borderline in usefulness, or correctness, or potential harm, quick downvotes can sometimes prevent it from snowballing with upvotes on the HNQ by decreasing its visibility.

I'm not saying this is ideal, especially for morale. But such is the nature of the HNQ list.

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