When to upvote and downvote posts?

Help Center · When to upvote and downvote posts?

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Voting on posts is an important moderation privilege, awarded to the users of this site upon reaching the required number of reputation points. Voting helps determine which questions and answers are most useful and appropriate. As opposed to flagging, voting is meant to be more subjective. Each user individually judges whether the post seems to be useful and interesting or not. Collectively their votes determine what the community thinks of the post. Due to the subjective nature of voting, it may be the case that some users vote the post up, and other users vote it down - and that's perfectly fine.

How can I determine whether the post is useful or not?
As mentioned above, this is a subjective call of each user. However, here are some pointers that can help you evaluate the post when in doubt.

• Could the post in its current form be useful to other users?
• Is the question in its current form something that other users could be interested in and are likely to search for it?
• Can the answer to a question reveal some interesting information or new facts?
• Did the author of the post put some effort into researching before posting?
• Did the author of the post put some effort into creating the post?
• For questions, do they explain the intention behind it or the context?

If for most of the questions above you think yes - then that's a signal the post is of high-quality and a good candidate for an up-vote. Otherwise, you may consider down-voting it.

When should I vote up?
Whenever you encounter a post that you feel is well-researched and useful to the community, vote it up. For questions, this means the post clearly presents the problem and what is expected in the answers. Answers should contain all the information requested. Additional assets, such as screenshots or links to trusted sources are also welcome.

When should I vote down?
Don't hesitate to vote posts down if you feel that they are not useful to the community, when they are unclear or when they are completely incorrect. For serious problems with the post, consider flagging it as per the instructions in What are flags and when should they be used?
It is a good idea to leave a comment together with the downvote so that the author or other users know how to improve this post.

Vote fair
Voting is a very important part of this site, as it is used to indicate which questions are useful and interesting, and which answers are correct or wrong. Votes on posts also determine user reputation points. Users who constantly provide valuable content earn new moderation privileges. Finally, the votes and reputation points are also taken into consideration in some of the contests.

For those reasons, we treat unfair voting very seriously. Please don't abuse your voting privileges to massively up-vote posts from your friends or to downvote posts of the users you don't like. Each of your votes should genuinely represent your best judgment on whether the post is correct and useful or not. Users who abuse the voting privileges may have their reputation points reduced as a warning, or their accounts can be locked completely.