
Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions - luu
http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/36660/most-down-voted-questions
======
denzil_correa
The questions which are really poor in quality end up being deleted. We did
some analysis of deleted questions and our results were published at WWW 2014
[0]. The dataset of deleted questions (up until June 2013) is also publicly
available [1]. We also built a machine learning system to predict questions
that would be deleted in the future using various features [2].

[0] [http://www2014.kr/wp-
content/uploads/2014/05/proceedings_p63...](http://www2014.kr/wp-
content/uploads/2014/05/proceedings_p631.pdf)

[1]
[https://archive.org/details/stackoverflow_2013_05_deleted_po...](https://archive.org/details/stackoverflow_2013_05_deleted_posts_stackoverflow)

[2] [https://github.com/denzilc/stackoverflow-deleted-
prediction](https://github.com/denzilc/stackoverflow-deleted-prediction)

~~~
melling
Questions are also deleted years later when the moderators arbitrarily decide
to. They refused to delete my questions when I deleted my account, which made
sense because they didn't want to lose all that information. I had over 100
questions, maybe 150 questions, after all.

Tonight, however, someone deleted my question because I discussed it on HN.

~~~
denzil_correa
I agree with you. However, the problem is that we can't consider something as
a true positive (for a paper) based on gut or intuition. We have to rely on
some sort of ground truth and this is the best sanitized sample we could get.

------
vijayboyapati
Sadly the Stackoverflow community seems to have become a lot more officious in
the last few years and the number of petty bureaucrats has skyrocketed. I
asked a genuine question which I didn't know the answer to and which I was
hoping someone else may have come across. It was immediately downvoted for not
having a proposed solution. Eventually it was upvoted and became positive
because it was a genuinely useful question. That kind of officiousness is
completely unnecessary and needlessly turns people off participating in the
community.

~~~
duncanawoods
At least you were told why you were downvoted.

I just had a similar experience - I posted an (IMHO) well written question
that was immediately downvoted with no comment. It has no answers because I
suspect few people are going to look at a <0 question.

This upset me more than it should because in a vulnerable moment of need, I
was digitally slapped. SO used to feel like a special gem of altruism where
devs helped each other out for the love of it but now it feels like a
faceless, cruel and nasty place that I want to avoid. I don't think we fully
account for the emotional impact of such events when we introduce voting\karma
type features.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
I make an effort to upvote questions and comments/answers that have been
unfairly downvoted. The same problem plagues HN for anyone who dares to defy
the groupthink.

------
IgorPartola
I was expecting horrible questions, basically spam. Nope, these are real and
legitimate questions and I don't see why most of these were downvoted. I
wonder what the data looks like beyond just some of the worst questions, and
whether the trend is going to be more and more "legitimate questions that are
either 'obvious' or already answered get downvoted." If so, that cannot be a
good thing.

~~~
hurin
Most down-voted doesn't mean it hadn't been upvoted, it just means a lot of
the people looking at it thought it was a bad question.

This one made me chuckle: _What is the name of the “-- >” operator?_

~~~
lmm
Before I clicked through I thought that was going to be a scalaz question.

------
melling
I've got the most downvoted Emacs question. It was actually even more
downvoted at one point.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11706028/creating-a-
elisp...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11706028/creating-a-elisp-
function-to-convert-url-to-html-link)

It was a pretty good question but I got into a debate with a moderator. That
was my last question and I did a rage quit.

As you can see it was a simple well-defined question, and it produced two good
answers.

~~~
lambda
> It was a pretty good question

No, this is not a good question for StackOverflow. You simply asked for
someone to write code for you, which is not what StackOverflow is intended to
be for. It is intended for help on a particular specific problem you are
having with your own code.

~~~
melling
It was a short well-defined question with given input and a specific output.
Elisp isn't the most widely used language so coming up to speed could be time
consuming. Someone else even starred it so they must have found it to be
useful.

If I'd just ask to "Calculate someone's age in C#", that'd be a much better
question?

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9/how-do-i-calculate-
some...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9/how-do-i-calculate-someones-age-
in-c)

~~~
maxerickson
It is arguably more specific.

It'd be interesting if they would just register something like shitpile.com,
set up an instance of Stack Exchange on it, turn off the moderation game, and
push closed and deleted questions there instead of disappearing them.

That would at least sort of be an experiment on whether all of the decisions
they have made about what Stack Exchange sites are 'supposed to be' actually
matter or not.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Now is it? It also asks basically to teach how subtraction works, which is
something you should know when leaving primary school.

~~~
maxerickson
Are you saying that you can't find a point of view where it would be a more
specific question? Because that's what I meant when I said 'arguably'.

Saying that you can find a point of view where it isn't more specific isn't
really that interesting (to me) as a response to that. Hopefully the rest of
my comment is enough to see that I was not particularly defending the SE
status quo.

~~~
Dylan16807
'arguably' still requires a _reasonable_ position that declares it true,
otherwise literally everything is arguable.

~~~
maxerickson
I think reasonableness is implicit enough in "find a point of view", do you
think I should recalibrate that expectation?

------
axg
Made a 'Most Controversial' query:
[http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/281279/mos...](http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/281279/most-
controversial-questions)

Sorry for the bad formatting, new to SQL

~~~
nickcano
I liked this idea, but noticed the gap between up/down votes was actually
quite large, meaning the questions weren't actually that controversial. I went
ahead and made a change that filtered out results where ABS(up - down) is less
than half of MAX(up, down). (its quite a bit messier than that, though, as
there's no MAX function in sql that selects the greater of two operands).

[http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/282007/mos...](http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/282007/most-
controversial-questions)

------
maaaats
Some of these questions lack context. For instance the one about neural
networks looks fine now, but you should have seen how the asker behaved..

------
RyanRies
TIL the third most down-voted question on Stack Overflow has 3,735 upvotes and
almost 1000 favorites.

~~~
Theodores
I think I am definitely going to start using the '\-->' operator, it is
awesome! If I mix in with a few 'Yoda conditionals' then the world is really
going to love my code.

------
leereeves
The history of the neural network question is an interesting case study in
democratic moderation:

[http://stackoverflow.com/posts/3455660/revisions](http://stackoverflow.com/posts/3455660/revisions)

100,000 emails too, with many more moderators:

[http://stackoverflow.com/posts/3905734/revisions](http://stackoverflow.com/posts/3905734/revisions)

------
NeutronBoy
The question about the single-layer neural networks being closed really bugs
me. The entire reason Stack Overflow is so great is that that are _experts_
there, that can answer my stupidly specific questions.

If I wanted generic answers to a problem, I can Google them and find some
half-assed forum post from 5 years ago.

------
chippy
The mod explanation for the Neural Net question is revealing:

"This question is unlikely to help any future visitors; it is only relevant to
a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily
narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of
the internet"

~~~
DanBC
That's a canned response. When users vote to close a question they have to
pick from a list. When a question is closed the most popular reason for
closing is automatically shown.

I guess it tells us that people will vote to close even if a question doesn't
fit into any of the close reasons, and that a previously "too broad" question
would be closed as "too narrow" if you tighten it up.

~~~
sesqu
That question clearly fit the canned reason for closing. It was a homework
debugging question on a tight deadline.

------
SiVal
I can't stand Stack Overflow. Quite obviously it is dominated by people who
would much rather show you who's the boss by competing, not for who can
provide you with the most useful answer, but by who can be first to find a
reason why your question doesn't deserve an answer (and then to block anyone
willing to answer from being able to do so).

Yes, of course, I understand the assertion: that by attacking questioners
instead of helping them, the alpha dogs are laboring selflessly to defend the
quality of Stack Overflow. You should thank them for biting you.

What nonsense. Imagine if Google took the SO approach to quality and
prioritized making you jump through hoops with your question over trying to
find the best answer it can: "your phrasing is ambiguous; if you think
otherwise, you can try rephrasing your query properly and try again", or "you
have misspelled one of the search terms; you should figure out which one and
look up the correct spelling before submitting a search; this is, you'll
agree, in everyone's best interest". Or, "not a constructive search query;
might lead to pages that include opinions". Or how about, "some of the words
in your query resemble those in another query made several years ago; here are
their results; if their results aren't helpful to you, you should have asked a
better question."

Of course SO, unlike Google, stores the questions, but SO could still learn
from Google's example. Google is so useful, because instead of improving
quality by strictly limiting what it will index and what you can ask ("no
pages expressing opinions", "index no new pages discussing any aspect of a
topic if some aspect of that topic was discussed on another page already in
the index", "the answer to your query has been found but will not be
displayed, because it was not of interest to our moderators"), it includes as
much _real_ (not fake) content as it can and uses technology to lead _any_
question to the most relevant answer it can.

How ironic that when you use Google to find a programming answer, it so often
judges some Stack Overflow entry most relevant. Then, if you follow the link,
you find that someone was trying to provide exactly the answer you were
looking for, but the mods spotted him, ruled that what Google had correctly
deemed most relevant to be "Not Constructive!" and had forbidden anyone else
from answering.

I'd love to see an alternative to SO that optimized for answering questions
instead of controlling them. One that allowed almost any programming question,
allowed anyone who wanted to answer to freely answer, that collected reams of
overlapping explanations and answers to multiple variations of programming
questions, and that used state of the art technology to lead questioners to
those answers that were likely to be most successful at answering your
specific question, while leaving the question open to anyone who wanted to
volunteer new answers, even if they are repeats or opinions, or provide their
own best-guess links to previous answers.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
In SO's case, clearly the mod culture is _not_ improving the quality or the
reputation of the site.

But I think it's mostly the hacker content that has this issue. The format
seems to work better in other contexts.

As someone said about academia - maybe the battles are so ferocious because
the stakes are so low.

~~~
vitd
I don't think it's clear at all. For someone who visits the site without
participating (for example to read an answer that showed up in a Google
search), they see a bunch of good answers. That looks like a high quality
site. Edited to add: And if their question was asked and deleted because it
was considered "bad", it never shows up in a Google search.

You can't say the mod culture is not improving the quality of the site because
you haven't provided the original content without moderation to see what it
looks like.

------
cgatesman
Seems kind of pointless if it is ignoring up-votes.

~~~
pauldino
You can fork the query if you don't like it. :)

For example here I added a condition to only show questions with negative
scores:
[http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/281235/mos...](http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/281235/most-
down-voted-questions)

------
jorjordandan
For some reason some of these have tons of UPVOTES like the question about
formatting Javascript dates. Something went wrong somewhere!

Actually several of the questions have a bunch of upvotes. Certainly more than
I've ever gotten on SO...

~~~
olavk
A question need visibility to get such a large amount of downvotes. They are
controversial questions which gets a high number of both up and downvotes.

------
ryan-allen
The first one I looked at, "Favourite Programming Cartoons", was a blast.

But hey, we've always been at war with Eurasia.

~~~
blorgbeard
Er, no - the question is closed, not deleted, because StackOverflow
acknowledges that we have _not_ always been at war with Eurasia.

Some time between that question being asked and now, StackOverflow's community
decided that they didn't want to be /r/programmerhumor

------
pmelendez
It's interesting. The "Single layer neural network" question has -75 but its
accepted answer has 157

------
elchief
I was hoping the top answer to the first question would be "Send 14300 emails
daily for a week"

------
cranklin
perhaps this would be more useful if it calculated the lowest upvote to
downvote ratio

------
biomimic
This is actually fairly hilarious.

