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This post is part of the hidden-feature series started by Mari-Lou A. These posts highlight features of this site that not everyone may know about but can certainly help get an insight into our content and allow users to find what they're looking for more easily.

In this case, we're focusing on post feedback to find hidden gems and overrated posts.

You may not have heard about anonymous, but they do a lot of voting around here. The way this works is that visitors who are not logged in and users who haven't earned the voting privilege still have their votes recorded, they just don't affect the score on the posts.

Sadly, these statistics are part of the 10K tools, so I don't know exactly how many votes (in absolute or relative terms they are responsible for).

For those who are fortunate enough in terms of reputation, find out on the post feedback summary page. Notice that the top-right corner has time-based filters for day, week, month, year, and all-time.

This overview also provides underrated and overrated posts. The tooltip on these read: No votes in the last year, helpful and No votes in the last year, unhelpful, respectively.

This overview also provides helpful and unhelpful posts. The way these posts are selected seems to be based on anonymous votes only.

In my view, this overview can be very helpful in finding hidden gems as well as overrated and controversial posts.

Since this is a meta question, I'd like to hear your thoughts on this. Should 10K users use this tool to be able to exert more quality control in an effort to raise the user experience on this site?

What do you envision? Should we share posts that may need some more votes (one way or the other)? Other SE sites sometimes have competitions where people can suggest posts on their main site. To make this a bit more fun, perhaps such competitions work well here by setting a monthly tag-based or original post-time based theme?

  • The difference in voting tendencies between registered and unregistered voters is striking. According to "Post Feedback," registered feedback for the year has been 425 (80.19%) upvotes and 105 (19.81%) downvotes; anonymous feedback for the year, meanwhile, has been 223,600 (44.61%) upvotes and 277,600 (55.39%) downvotes. The all-time numbers are even more divergent: registered feedback for all time has been 6,000 (87.11%) upvotes and 890 (12.89%) downvotes; anonymous feedback for all time breaks out as 1.3 million (46.91%) upvotes and 1.4 million (53.09%) downvotes. – Sven Yargs Jul 30 at 6:31
  • @SvenYargs interesting. In terms of percentages, those are very similar to the numbers on Politics SE. Anonymous feedback tends to 50-50, whereas registered feedback favours upvotes. – JJ for Transparency and Monica Jul 30 at 6:46
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    @SvenYargs There’s no reputation penalty for downvoting anonymously, either for the voters or others. It might be a bit different when you’re actually penalizing the author of a post instead of just not liking the post. Also, registered voters can’t downvote until 125 rep, but can upvote at 15 rep. – ColleenV parted ways Jul 30 at 11:54
  • Since anonymous votes don't count for anything, is it possible for an anonymous user to "vote" multiple times on the same Q or A? I could definitely see an anonymous user clicking multiple times before seeing the toast informing them their vote isn't counted. – shoover Aug 1 at 20:23
  • @shoover it's probably logged based on a cookie or IP. So they might vote multiple times if they change that, which is quite labour intensive (if doing manually). It's probably not a securely guarded as logged-in users because it doesn't affect the site directly other than these logs. Nevertheless, I think they can be nice indications to see where visitors go on the site. For example when old questions we've forgotten about get visited by hundreds of googlers each day, then it might be best to have a look at them, maybe improve (by editing or providing a new answer). – JJ for Transparency and Monica Aug 2 at 0:43
  • On SE sites that I haven't joined, if I vote, the vote 'bounces' and I get a friendly message about signing up. The vote itself isn't displayed. Are you saying that these votes are actually logged? – Lawrence Aug 7 at 16:32
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    @Lawrence yes, anonymous votes are logged. – JJ for Transparency and Monica Aug 7 at 16:50
  • Thanks, that's news to me. +1 – Lawrence Aug 7 at 16:58
  • It's worth noting that this is a relatively new tool (it was present for a while a few years ago, then later removed, then later reinstated). – gparyani Aug 12 at 7:00

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