We have more users who vote lots but don't ever really post. How can we fix it?

Question

While looking at some user statistics on SEDE I noticed a disturbing trend: the average downvote on Security SE comes from users with much less contribution on this site compared to other SE sites. It's similarly much more likely on this SE that a downvote came from a user who only has a few questions or answers. (see the table below or this query).

I believe this encourages inaccurate downvoting, and downvoting by users who hardly ever see the other side of the table and may be out-of-touch with the asking and answering experience. What gives someone who's only answered one or two questions in the past few years the nerve to presume they know how to criticize literally hundreds of questions on this site?

+---------------------+------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------+
| Stack Exchange Site | Avg # of posts per downvoter | Chance a downvote is from someone with <10 posts |
+---------------------+------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------+
| Security            | 215                          | 10.7%                                            |
+---------------------+------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------+
| Code Review         | 578                          | 7.2%                                             |
+---------------------+------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------+
| Android Enthusiasts | 230                          | 8.1%                                             |
+---------------------+------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------+
| Database Admins     | 396                          | 3.1%                                             |
+---------------------+------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------+
| Web Apps            | 550                          | 3%                                               |
+---------------------+------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------+
| Wordpress Dev       | 567                          | 3.7%                                             |
+---------------------+------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------+

I think this is a problem with a few select users, not the majority. There are about 23% of downvotes that come from 14 users who collectively have submitted 0.5% of posts in the past 5 years. 5% of downvotes come from 10 users who have fewer than 10 recent posts on this site. A few of these users have only given two answers and yet have given hundreds of downvotes.

I assume most downvotes are genuine, but I do believe there are abusive and incorrect patterns that need to be rooted out on occasion. One of these patterns of abuse may be a small group of users who vote excessively despite being unfamiliar with the asking and answering experience.

This pattern of users who vote but don't answer helps incorrect answers to rise to the top and decent questions to get mocked. This is supposed to be a community of experts, not Reddit's r/funny, and the criteria for what's good and bad are complicated. Looking the other way while a user who's barely demonstrated any understanding of infosec or Stack Exchange makes hundreds of judgments about what threats are and aren't realistic, what ideas don't work in practice, and what is and isn't on-topic is irresponsible. How can a user with too few reputation to see "vote counts" give out over 200 downvotes?

(Edited to add the next two paragraphs) There should be enough votes from everyone that one person's biases or shortcomings are washed out in the community. One user shouldn't be able to manipulate the standards of a "bad question" to fit his views. Similarly, I'm not sure enough about each moderator's biases to be comfortable with them giving me 5% of my downvotes.

Say one of these people decides questions on workplace security policies aren't on-topic enough, that naive questions are always unacceptable, or that long questions like these are preferable to laconic ones? Do you want him making that judgement on over a thousand questions and single-handedly shaping community opinion? If one person becomes a dominant voice on this community of thousands, we need to hold them to a higher standard of impartiality, experience, and oversight.

Be aware that one or two of the long-time users who frequent Meta are on the list of people voting far more than they post, and so this may question may stir up some criticism and controversy. I'm honestly curious what the lurkers have to say and what their side of the story is.

The heart of this question is 1) whether we want to discourage some users from spending an extreme and disproportionate amount of time reviewing and criticizing questions (especially doing less-constructive activities like downvoting) instead of contributing answers to questions, and 2) whether we trust these people enough to give the loudest person in the room a disproportionate and anonymous input into community standards

Solutions could include:

• Moderators sending messages to and working with individuals who display excessive behavior to understand their circumstances and take action if necessary
• Encouraging users who lurk but don't answer to answer more questions
• Limiting extreme behavior (e.g. rate limiting votes to about 5/minute to make sure serial voters have time to read the question, rate-limiting votes before users have 1000 rep, a policy that if you're going to vote more than 30 times in a week you need to have answered at least one question in the past two months, etc.)
• Added solution: On the positive side, just encourage people to vote more and participate more so that one or two frequent users don't determine the voice of the community just because they vote often

Some related Meta questions: Why are there voting limits?, Voting limits discourage participation, and Weighting down-voting.

Answer 1

I noticed that I'm third in the query results, so let me explain what happens (in my case, and probably in @tripleee's case as well). I often visit Security.SE after a report of a possible spam post in Charcoal HQ. I flag said post as spam, but I also often downvote it. Of the 195 downvotes I've cast so far, only 36 remain (the other posts have been deleted); I've just checked this in the Votes tab on my profile.

Answer 2

Investigation

Thanks for bringing this up and providing some good statistics to work from!

5% of downvotes come from 10 users who have fewer than 10 recent posts on this site.

I think this is the really interesting statistic here. It could indicate a problem, but it could also be perfectly fine. To investigate, I took a look at those users and some proxies to if their downvoting is positive or not.

• They are active on other sites. Seven has more than 5k in total on other sites. Six have more than 5k in total on a single other site. In general, people have reputation on technology sites. This signals that they contribute relevant knowledge.
• They also upvote. Only two have a downvote to upvote ratio over three. This indicate that they are not just troll downvoting, but actually judging the quality of posts.

Of the ten, there is only one that has little reputation on other sites and doesn't also upvote. That user has seven posts that has received a total of 17 upvotes and 0 downvotes.

It is also worth pointing out that out of the five percent, two come from one single use. That user has a short program for post quality in their profile, and to me seems to be a very valuable contributor.

Conclusion

Downvoting itself is not bad. In fact, we need more of it. Recently I made a silly math error in an answer, that led me to a wildly incorrect conclusion. I got four upvotes and no downvotes.

But there are bad downvotes, off course. And making lots of downvotes and posting few posts could be an indicator on that. But to me, that does not seem to be the case here.

So I do not think we have a problem here, and we do not need to take any action. Or am I missing something?

Answer 3

I fail to see a problem here too. Judging if a question or answer is valueable is easier than providing a new answer or ask an original question. This becomes even harder as the site and the pool of existing questions grows.