I see your point - and at least can agree to the observation that in my experience, as well, the downvoting is faster and more likely on this site than on many other SE sites I've seen. I'm torn on whether that's good or bad and/or what it means. Being so torn, I don't have a great answer on what to do (if anything) about it, but here's some observations.
Nature of questions is a bit different
The Workplace has wrestled with this since it's inception. Our questions are a bit different and there are times when SE has even debated whether these types of questions can even fit the SE format in a useful way (there was a podcast between Joel and Jay on this a while back). The problem is that The Workplace questions can be both very opinion oriented and have more than one successful path. I think there will always need to be some fast-acting downvoting to provide a certain deterrent.
Things I feel are particularly hazardous here:
- highly opinion driven questions - they almost always boil down to "I'm right, aren't I?" - it may be we can reword them, but I see enough of them in a week that I don't mind the gut reaction to the question being a downvote, to hopefully deter users from getting in the habit of submitting this type of question.
- sagas of woe - long questions that tell such a particular set of circumstances that I can't see how they can possibly be reuseable. While the specifics of lines of code can be really helpful on Stack Overflow, the intimate details of a person's background and the last 5 years of a horrible problem is both hard to read and hard to answer. If it can be summed up and made generic, great, - but I'm glad to see the penalty start with downvotes.
I agree that bad questions can be saved, but every time we try to save a question, we also risk morphing the question so heavily that it's no longer useful to the original asker. That really breaks the mold of the forum, and starts to drive us away from the usefulness of answering actual questions.
Why it's bad
I dislike the trend of "come to The Workplace, get a downvote" and I do worry that it happens too often. I think if you got slammed for your first question, then it's unlikely we'll hear about your second or third question - and those might be really useful additions to the knowledge base and the greater good. In all honesty, I think we have a couple of key entrance question areas and I'd like to see the question base broaden.
Why it's good
We can't be the pit of every badly worded question. There's awards for those who help make questions better and that's a useful function for members of the community. Downvoting may highlight the very areas that need a fix, and at a minimum, they highlight what not to do. Hoping that by downvoting less we'll somehow improve the forum doesn't seem like a way to go here.
