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You can change your vote for a question (or answer) after it has been edited. Quite often at least questions improve soon (because the questioner is told that the question is bad and what information is missing).

I caught myself thinking after downvoting a question or answer: Will I notice a possible improvement of this post and thus revoke my downvote?

Thus I thought it would be nice to be informed of edits to a post which one has downvoted. I could understand that people who vote very often do not want to get many notifications (though that would contradict the idea of the vote change possibility after an edit) but you could be asked everytime you downvote: "Do you want to be notified of edits to this post?"

Additional thought: If a downvote is revoked then the author of the post should not get back both reputation points but just one. I think there should be a difference between those who ask good questions and those who just repair their bad questions after causing the trouble of having to tell them to. (There already is an implicit penalty, of course: You don't get upvoted while the post is bad and most readers will not come back to it later.)

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  • I don't understand If a downvote is revoked then the author of the post should not get back both reputation points but just one. What other reputation points are you referring to, other than the one lost from being downvoted?
    – tshepang
    Commented May 11, 2013 at 6:37
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    @Tshepang: you lose 2 rep. when one of your posts is downvoted, Hauke is proposing that only one of those two get "refunded" if the downvote is removed. (I think.)
    – Mat
    Commented May 11, 2013 at 6:41
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    Related post on MSO.
    – Mat
    Commented May 11, 2013 at 6:44
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    @Mat Strange, so many upvotes, so many answers, noone against it, proposals for implementation details – and nothing happened?
    – Hauke Laging
    Commented May 11, 2013 at 14:13
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    That's not the only one like that :-) (There is an answer by Jeff Atwood at the end). I don't think I've seen the "don't refund the whole points" thing proposed before, but I'm relatively pessimistic about how that would be received. I don't really like the idea myself.
    – Mat
    Commented May 11, 2013 at 14:19
  • @Mat So give it another try now that he has left SE? ;-)
    – Hauke Laging
    Commented May 11, 2013 at 14:25

1 Answer 1

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it would be nice to be informed of edits to a post which one has downvoted

I had a similar thought, and chased it down through various Metas, eventually landing at Stack Apps: Get a list of posts you've voted on that have been edited where there's a browser-based userscript that adds a sub-tab to your profile's Votes tab.

I use it occasionally by going to my profile, then to the Votes tab, then to the downvote sub-tab, then clicking on the "edited since voting" sub-tab. Doing things in a different order may result in the userscript searching for other types of votes, and could cause you to hit the rate limiter.

It's handy because it calls out both Questions and Answers, making it easy to search (within your browser) for either "Q: " or for "A: " if you're interested in narrowing your focus for possibly undoing a downvote.

Here's a screenshot of a random sampling from my profile, complete with amateur masking and freehand circles around the already-browser-highlighted Answers:

edited since downvoting screenshot

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