On down voting and the Buddhism SE

Question

Hello Buddhism SE community

I rarely downvote answers, when I do my reasons are simple :

• Inaccurate information
• Does not address or answer the question

I want to know

Are there other reasons where downvoting should be utilized for answers on the site?

As for questions, I also rarely downvote

Reasons for that would be

• Question is not about Buddhism
• Question has clear agenda
• Question unclear

Same as above, are there other reasons when downvoting should be utilized for questions?

With these I always provide a comment on how to improve if possible. Minus the agenda one, I don't have time to be pulled into those dramas. With the answers a comment will be provided if I think the user will actually edit or improve the answer.

Now I don't want people to think I'm the downvote master, I use them sparingly. 250 upvotes to 22 downvotes is around a 9 to 1 ratio.

I do think as the site grows, and gains members, downvoting, and the community ideals around it should be solidified.

A third point of discussion on down voting in general

Do we as a SE downvote enough?

One might wonder why I ask this, well, after going through some questions that would be considered controversial (In the sense that answers take sharp contrast, depending on what school of buddhism you belong too.) and there are hardly any answers with controversy. A few were spotted here and there, but most were all upvotes and no down, or all down and no up.

Now this might be a testament to the accuracy of the answers, and the few that did have both up and down voted (7^ 3v, 12 up 5 down, etc) were indeed controversial. There were some with only upvotes and no downvotes that I wondered how no one voted down. Though after reading I myself did not think they needed a downvote, but know of Buddhists who would disagree with me.

I am interested in reading what the community thinks on these 3 questions.

Answer 1

Just my 2 cents, which is really not different from how I vote on other SE sites.

I vote down if it would improve the sort order of answers. Sometimes a mediocre answer has lots of votes and floats to the top because it was answered early in the questions life and now a better answer exists.

I refrain from downvoting if it changes the sign (from 0 to -1) unless I want to send a signal to the person answering the question that they did something wrong and I hope that they will fix it.