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Stack Exchange has decided to raise question upvote from +5 to +10 and applied it to all communities, including the private ones. I image that this one implemented like this because it was much quicker (no customization at community level).

I have raised the concern about the private communities being affected by this change and it is scheduled to allow some sort of customization for this sometime in 2020.

If this becomes an option, should we use the opportunity to come back to +5 value for the question upvote?

Personally, I am in favor of +5 instead of +10 because it is significantly harder to provide an answer that asking a question.

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    It's funny to see you say asking questions is easier. Noting that you mostly asked questions and I mostly answer questions, I think it depends a lot on personal preference. ;)
    – JJJ Mod
    Dec 6, 2019 at 14:35
  • @JJforTransparencyandMonica - how much time do you typically spend for a fairly good answer (a couple of references, multiple perspectives etc.)?
    – Alexei
    Dec 6, 2019 at 14:37
  • It depends, with the current affairs topics I mostly have something in mind already based on watching the news and having heard about some investigation or report on the matter. For answers based on international law it mostly takes a lot of googling even when I have specific concepts in mind. So it mostly takes up to 10 minutes to get an idea of the direction of the answer and then maybe up to half an hour to write it (finding appropriate quotes, formatting the references, etc.).
    – JJJ Mod
    Dec 6, 2019 at 14:48
  • @JJforTransparencyandMonica - for me it takes somewhere from 5 to 30 minutes to ask a question. Generally speacking, since many questions provide little context and virtually no references, I would say that the average time for asking a question is no longer than 10 minutes. My point is that it takes significantly more effort to answer than to ask.
    – Alexei
    Dec 6, 2019 at 14:53

3 Answers 3

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No.

Looking at the politics.SE stats, the site isn't doing so well on "questions per day", so incentivizing asking questions seems like a good thing.

That doesn't necessarily mean that it will help us get out of beta status, but I think more high quality questions can help the community in general.

The "answer ratio" is also not that great here, and more questions would presumably hurt it, but it's not as bad as the questions stat.

I'm also not sure if this will ever be an option for SE sites, or only for teams. IMHO letting each site determine their own points system wouldn't be a good idea. If it ever becomes an option, increasing the weight of downvotes seems like a much more needed feature here.

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  • Technically we crossed the not-so-magical 7 year threshold so maybe we could request Beta removal now if people wanted to
    – Machavity
    Dec 11, 2019 at 13:37
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    @Machavity Noooo... then I would lose my voting abilities until I get my rep up to 3k! Dec 13, 2019 at 4:25
  • Not quite. None of the "graduated" sites abandoned beta rep rules. We would simply drop the word "beta" from the site
    – Machavity
    Dec 13, 2019 at 12:23
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As long as politics stackexchange does not stand on its own, I'd argue that the (potential) benefit of using the same rules as the main site outweighs the (potential) drawbacks of using +10/+10.

This argument of mine becomes irrelevant if/when the bulk of new politics users come here from other sources than hot network questions.

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No.

A site dies without a continuous supply of quality and on-topic questions. Anything that could be seen as suggesting "we are twice as important/valuable as you are" might feel discouraging to those who mostly ask questions, and generate a subconscious less-than-optimal attitude in those who mostly post answers.

Yin-Yang, chicken-and-egg, questions and answers. Each facilitates the other, each needs a continuous supply of quality posts of the other kind.

Those who mostly ask questions, if encouraged and rewarded by positive feedback can develop question answering skills and aptitude over time.

Those who mostly post answers should probably be encouraged to continue to post an occasional question to have a better appreciation of and/or to monitor what the question-asking experience is like on a given site.

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