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Is it allowed to place comments under questions saying something like:

"please don't upvote this question anymore, it already has 10 votes, and we need other questions to reach that threshold too so that this proposal can move to the beta stage"

Viewing different proposals I see this happening quite often. Is it allowed? Does doing this have any consequences?

Personally, I think this is a bad thing, because everyone should decide on his or her own opinion on what to vote. Reading such comments make me feel like I should vote for some other question only to make the group of the proposal a favour, but that's not what voting is about, is it? These comments kind of annoy me.

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  • The solution to this would be that as soon as any question hits 10 upvotes, it gets moved to the bottom of the list. It's just bad design to promote what is already popular when the rules require breadth of popular questions and limit one's number of votes—not that the rules are bad, just the design with regard to those rules
    – Rubellite Fae
    Commented Nov 29, 2019 at 22:53

4 Answers 4

Reset to default
7

Some people think it is good to speed up the process, I have to disagree.

As you can see on a lot of proposals, only some of the people following the proposal are going to commit to it. I see no good reason to speed up this process, if people are not willing to follow and vote on the proposal it is very likely that they wont commit to it either.

Voting questions beyond 10 shows which questions are important for the community, they are likely to show up as the top example questions in the commitment phase and will heavily define the sites purpose beside the subtext below the title.

What to do about those comments? I am not sure if it would be OK to flag them. You could reason that they don't help to improve the question and are thus off topic, but on the other hand they don't really hurt and the mods may have better things to do.

This answer might help although it does not specifically address comments of the type you are asking about.

Comments under a question are an ephemeral history of how a question came to be asked, as it is in its current revision. 99.9% of the time, once feedback has been received on a question, the comments should no longer be necessary unless there's something of lasting value intrinsic to the short conversation that led to a question being refined.

3

The idea of voting system is to reward good questions.

If you think a question is good, you should upvote it, if it is bad, you should downvote it.

As general, if you downvote a question or answer, you can leave the comment why you think it is bad, but especially on Area51, you shouldn't suggest other users what they should do.

I've asked last time a question about spam answers: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/180207/how-to-flag-duplicate-answers but the guidelines would apply also to comments. The moderator flags, especially spam flag, shouldn't be overused because the moderators are overloaded anyway.

So I'd write just as a comment, that the author of such comment is simply not understanding the voting system.

-4

Most new users are going to run out of upvotes before they've read down through 20 questions, and then you're not allowed to undo your upvotes, because that costs more. I'd thinkit would make sense that the system itself said "This question already has enough upvotes to qualify" and didn't let you waste one of your five votes on it, until someone else same along and downvoted it out of there.

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  • 3
    What do you mean with "not allowed to undo your upvotes"? You can always undo your upvote on an area51 example question.
    – THelper
    Commented Apr 25, 2013 at 11:27
-6

Why would it bother you. All that really matters is that a question gets 10 up votes. If you cast your vote to take a question above 10 then you are not helping the proposal move towards the commitment phase. If there are good questions that have not hit the 10 vote threshold you help move the proposal forward by voting for those. If there are not good questions to up vote then you can help the proposal by creating good questions to up-vote.

Note that the comment is a request not a compulsion. If you feel you still want to add the up-vote to the question that is your choice.

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  • 7
    If you believe that the system is just a game to get some 40 questions upvoted 10 times to move to the next phase of the game, fine. But some of us believe that the process should be respected. The goal isn't just to get 80 people to upvote 5 times each. The goal is to define the site. And knowing which questions, even out of the top 40, are considered better than the others is part of that. People should stop treating the process as "stuff I have to do to get into Beta".
    – Nicol Bolas
    Commented Mar 18, 2013 at 13:44
  • 1
    @NicolBolas - It is not a game and I never said it was. As I said if you feel strongly that you need to vote for a question that is already at 10 then do so. If you are voting to help get the proposal moving forward to the commitment phase. The process is about defining on topic not which are the best questions. That will be done when the site is live. And I have seen sites go live that actually rejected some of their highly voted questions from the define phase.
    – Chad
    Commented Mar 18, 2013 at 13:53
  • "The process is about defining on topic not which are the best questions." The way you define what's on-topic is by picking the best questions. The ones people consider the best are the on-topic ones. "* And I have seen sites go live that actually rejected some of their highly voted questions from the define phase.*" That sounds like a problem those sites are having with the process. You can argue whether the process is good or effective or whatever; what matters to me is what the process is. And that this process not be subverted.
    – Nicol Bolas
    Commented Mar 18, 2013 at 14:00
  • @NicolBolas - How is the process being subverted? The process is automated it does not require sign off from anyone at SE to go from planning to commitment. It requires 60 followers and 40 questions with 10 or more score. It doesnt care if there are 40 questions with 10 score or 39 questions with 100 score and 1 question with 10. The process is meet the minimum standards to get into commitment.
    – Chad
    Commented Mar 18, 2013 at 14:10
  • 2
    The purpose of the 10 upvote requirement is to show that a lot of people are interested in this question and think it is on-topic. The purpose of the 40 question requirement is to make sure that there are sufficient numbers of questions that people think are good, so as to be able to broadly define the site. By telling people to not vote on questions that they're interested in because it will "waste" their upvote shows that you're focused on getting the bare minimum, not on picking good questions. If all you're trying to do is get a D- to not fail a class, you're not learning.
    – Nicol Bolas
    Commented Mar 18, 2013 at 14:13
  • @NicolBolas - This is a pass fail. You pass by getting 40 questions right even if you have 500 questions wrong... There is no bonus for having 500 right questions, or even 40 questions that are even more right.
    – Chad
    Commented Mar 18, 2013 at 14:24
  • 2
    And that's where we get into the "it's a game" part. You think of it as pass/fail; once you get into commitment, you don't care what happened in the definition stage. To you, the definition stage was a hoop to jump through, a hurdle to be passed on the road to beta. To me, the definition stage should be informing the later stages. And part of that information is which questions were more preferable than the others, and by how much.
    – Nicol Bolas
    Commented Mar 18, 2013 at 14:26
  • 1
    @NicolBolas - Actually I do think it is important. But the important thing is that we can get 40 good on topic questions identified. I have been a part of enough beta's now that I realize that what gets defined here is like the first mile of the the trip. It is an important first mile and it gets on the road but often you end up going a different direction in the end. It is not so much of a game as part of a process to be completed. Trying to complete a process efficiently is not something bad.
    – Chad
    Commented Mar 18, 2013 at 14:38
  • @Chad You wrote: "If you cast your vote to take a question above 10 then you are not helping the proposal..." Please see this part of my question: "Reading such comments make me feel like I should vote for some other question only to make the group of the proposal a favour". That's why such comments bother me.
    – Uooo
    Commented Mar 19, 2013 at 5:31
  • @w4rumy - you are not helping the proposal move towards the commitment phase. you left off the qualifier. Ignoring the last part changes the entire sentence.
    – Chad
    Commented Mar 19, 2013 at 12:54
  • @Chad I refer to the full sentence, just cut the last part so my comment does not get too long. I cut my sentence as well.
    – Uooo
    Commented Mar 19, 2013 at 13:06
  • @NicolBolas If the process were respected, then Area51 newbies would be taken into consideration. The current design promotes what is already popular. Questions with 10 votes should be automatically sorted to the bottom. If you don't think order matters, then it should be fine. If order does matter, then give underdog questions a chance.
    – Rubellite Fae
    Commented Nov 29, 2019 at 22:59

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