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  • 5
    I like what you're trying to accomplish. I'm a little queasy about concealing votes without saying you're concealing votes, but as soon as you say it people will know why so I don't know how to do that cleanly. (Election primaries also conceal negative votes, but they do it for all candidates; you're doing it for only some questions.) I think you'll want the promotion period to be longer than 12-24 hours, but shorter than the week that a bounty gets -- maybe 2 or 3 days? Remember: timezones, weekends, and the general press of life can keep people from noticing right away.
    – Monica Cellio
    Commented Jun 21, 2015 at 19:50
  • Those are some pretty good suggestions; the timing specifically would work well. I'm not sure how to broach the "not telling people" portion since I feel that may defeat the purpose; I want the question to be revisited with a relatively clean slate and for it to be free of any previous prejudices. If we're telling people that the actual vote is being hidden, I'm not so sure if the reaction we'd get - would it be positive, negative, or neutral?
    – Makoto
    Commented Jun 21, 2015 at 20:06
  • Right -- if you tell people you're concealing the votes then people know it's a downvoted question, but if you don't you're being unpredictably dishonest (the reader no longer knows which questions report votes accurately and which don't). I don't have a good answer to this.
    – Monica Cellio
    Commented Jun 21, 2015 at 20:10
  • Perhaps it could be added in with the view of close votes privilege. If a question is in the process of being forgiven, then they could identify it and see either the accurate score, or the score before and during forgiveness.
    – Makoto
    Commented Jun 21, 2015 at 20:21
  • I'd like to see something like this, but more like: pay 50 rep to hijack this question. Votes will be reset to 0 after your edit. You are now this question's OP. Only abandoned questions are viable. - "Abandoned" is a term to be decided: some amount of inactivity? There's a giant flow of Fallout 4 questions by 1 reps getting hammered pretty hard at Arqade. Users there seem apt to just try to box them out, with no attempt at constructive edits. The SOP seems to be: if OP is unresponsive, just throw the baby out with the bathwater. #wrongwaywrongroad
    – Mazura
    Commented Jan 9, 2016 at 5:20
  • @Mazura: There's very, very little value in taking over the OP's question; depending on the question, there's very little you could do to aid it as the OP once you do take it over.
    – Makoto
    Commented Jan 9, 2016 at 8:07
  • 4
    Bounties achieve some of this intent by highlighting the question (special indicator + dedicated 'Featured' tab). If you start a bounty, your reason for doing so is also stated in the bounty's banner. However, you don't get the rep back when setting bounties; think of it as a donation.
    – Lawrence
    Commented Jan 12, 2016 at 23:10
  • @Lawrence: A bounty isn't enough to undo the negative impression that a question gets if it's heavily downvoted. Further, a bounty never awards the question, but rather the answer.
    – Makoto
    Commented Jan 12, 2016 at 23:11
  • 2
    @Makoto What it does is give others a push and a stated reason to reconsider the question.
    – Lawrence
    Commented Jan 12, 2016 at 23:21
  • 3
    eh, keep it simple. you spend n rep per downvote cast to reset all of the voting back to 0. you can use said privilege once per month on open questions with more than n downvotes. no concealing, no voodoo, just a plain old reset button.
    – Kevin B
    Commented Aug 3, 2017 at 22:43
  • @KevinB: Now that I'm revisiting this (I've simply engraved this URL into a shiny pitchfork that I use every now and then on MSO), I'm thinking of setting some minimum rep contribution. Not so sure on the monthly thing, but saying no more than three active ones (similar to bounties) would be alright, too.
    – Makoto
    Commented Aug 3, 2017 at 22:45
  • 2
    I think this is a good idea, but the implementation is too complicated. A simple reset would work better. The original down-voters get their 1 reputation back, and also get pinged that something happened to the question if they look at their reputation notices. Maybe a 20:1 reputation cost, a limited number of questions over some time period, and you can only set the question to -1 (so your up-vote takes it to zero)? That would be 180 reputation to reset a -10 question to zero score. I'm not sure that's high enough though.
    – ColleenV
    Commented Aug 4, 2017 at 16:55
  • @ColleenV: Resetting this wouldn't be suitable since you're basically assuming that the person forgiving the question is absolutely correct in their decision. By at least keeping that history around, you can determine if they actually were right by comparing new data to old data.
    – Makoto
    Commented Apr 18, 2018 at 16:12
  • In my experience, this would only work on StackOverflow and maybe SuperUser. On other sites, questions downvoted to -10 are hopeless: things like Holocaust denial on History, crackpottery on Physics, or "How do I hack Facebook?" on Information Security. Questions that are merely poorly asked get one or two downvotes and an "unclear" closure.
    – Mark
    Commented Dec 8, 2018 at 1:01
  • I don't agree with the exact numbers. It shouldn't start at such a high amount and only increase by a very low amount per vote. Overall, though, this is a good feature request.
    – Picachieu
    Commented Dec 26, 2018 at 2:07