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Would it be possible to prevent upvoting of questions when they reach an (equalized) rating of +10? Since you get only five votes on each proposal, why would you waste them on bringing a question to 11 when only 10 are needed?

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Then someone downvotes it and then it will be "unlocked" where someone else can upvote. – anon Jan 10 at 15:39
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@ColeJohnson That would require people to watch their favorite proposals just in case they get downvoted. – Josh Mein Jan 10 at 15:40
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@Josh not really. A new follower comes in and upvoted it back. Plus, there are some people who watch proposals. – anon Jan 10 at 15:42
You still are not getting a true conceunsus of what the community thinks as you are not allowing everyone to vote. – Josh Mein Jan 10 at 15:50
@Josh ok, but it would be nice if people would stop downvoting me as I don't want to take away the answerer's new rep – anon Jan 10 at 15:53
Don't worry about the 10 rep. You will gain it back in no time. :) – Josh Mein Jan 10 at 15:57
@Josh not really. If you look at my reputation comparison, it goes from ~3k on Stack Overflow ~500 on Area 51 to ~350 on Super User. – anon Jan 10 at 16:01
As for the downvotes: see the faq; votes on MSO are different from the regular Stack Exchange websites. People are voting on your proposal. Don't worry about rep here on MSO, it's fairly meaningless. – Martijn Pieters Jan 10 at 16:08
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@Martijn rep = privileges – anon Jan 10 at 17:00

migrated from meta.stackoverflow.com Jan 10 at 16:20

2 Answers

up vote 21 down vote accepted

No, you want to give the community a chance to vote for all questions, both up and down. The score needs to reflect (budding) community opinion.

By locking a question to a score of max 10, you remove that option. Downvoters would gain an unfair advantage, as their downvote would suddenly weigh more than the upvotes.

The voting process defines the community, locking the score to 10 would also remove the ability to find consensus as to what makes a great question versus one that is merely a nice one. They'd all look the same, stuck at +10.

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up vote 8 down vote

Martijn's post pretty much covers the pragmatic considerations, but you also have to consider the purpose of voting on questions. It's to show that is a sufficient breadth of high-quality questions to start a site. If (hypothetically) a proposal had only one decent question, you wouldn't want to simply shuffle people's votes the the next "least-objectionable" question in the line up.

We need 10 high-quality questions; not just 400 votes on… whatever.

Getting a proposal through Area 51 is tough going. It takes a lot of support, engagement, and quality contribution — That is by design. Shuffling the votes around to optimize the process into a production line somewhat defeats the purpose of Area 51. Every vote counts and no one should be told their vote is being wasted. In our evaluation, such efforts do not bode well for the proposal.

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So should we flag comments that discourage further upvotes on questions simply because they're already at 10? Would you consider these flags noise or would you delete such comments? I see this behavior more and more frequently, and I must say I'm not a fan. :) – jmort253 Feb 3 at 2:37
@jmort, it is one thing to say users shouldn't be allowed to vote on a +10 questions, and another thing to say that users shouldn't be encouraged to vote on other questions instead. There is nothing wrong with the latter. Users ultimately make up their own mind, but it is good for them to be informed that unless more down-votes occur on that question, their vote will be useless for the progress of the proposal. – Chris Mar 21 at 22:28

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