Need to introduce downvote option to "best practice" and "clever" solution buttons

[sergeitereshonkov]

In almost every cata many solutions marked as "best practice" but some of them actually tricky or has really awfull code that not according to best practice vote. After first vote them pop up in the top and other people continue to mark them as "good solutions" misleading novice to reproduce that in their code. It will be good to give community to downvote bad solutions like in stackoverflow and other sites.

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[Voileexperiments]

Unfortunately, just like every other site CodeWars users mostly consists of noobs, so don't expect everyone to be able to vote for the best :(

You can still leave comments on a kata solution though. (Assuming it's not already flooded with... even more noobs asking about some basic syntax questions.)

[docgunthrop]

@fxrbfg Introducing a downvote button would likely exacerbate the situation by opening a new channel for abuse. The best course of action is to simply make a comment to the given solution explaining how it is not best practice / clever.

[andreAbtahi96]

Yeah, I definitely agree! As a beginner myself in codewars, I don't know how constructive a downvote would be if there is not any feedback.

[max1c]

Came here to open an issue about this. Obviously this will not solve the problem completely. But it will mitigate it somewhat. All of the silly one liners can be upvoted with 'Clever' but downvoted with 'Best Practices' this way.

[memowe]

I think it's a social problem, not a technical need for a feature.

Personally, I strongly advocate for upvotes only, at least in my Haskell bubble it seems to work quite good. Votes are just not fair anyway as some solutions are posted years later than others.

Instead, I would like to have more discussions on kata solutions, maybe there's a subtle way to improve the motivation to leave a short comment via the UI, maybe we just have to start doing it.

[max1c]

Personally, I strongly advocate for upvotes only, at least in my Haskell bubble it seems to work quite good. Votes are just not fair anyway as some solutions are posted years later than others.

Well, you're clearly wrong because it obviously doesn't work at all. Years of evidence to back it up.

[memowe]

Personally, I strongly advocate for upvotes only, [...]

Well, you're clearly wrong because it obviously doesn't work at all. Years of evidence to back it up.

Do you have one or two example links for me?

[max1c]

Do you have one or two example links for me?

Sure:
https://www.codewars.com/kata/58905bfa1decb981da00009e/solutions/cpp
https://www.codewars.com/kata/520b9d2ad5c005041100000f/solutions/python

The highest voted "Best Practices" are not at all best practices. Unless, of course, you were looking for Haskell examples which I can't provide because I know nothing about Haskell. But I somehow doubt that it's different there as well. Almost every single language has horrible practices upvoted to the top just because the solution is condensed to the shortest possible number of lines.

[Voileexperiments]

The highest voted "Best Practices" are not at all best practices. Unless, of course, you were looking for Haskell examples which I can't provide because I know nothing about Haskell. But I somehow doubt that it's different there as well. Almost every single language has horrible practices upvoted to the top just because the solution is condensed to the shortest possible number of lines.

Please note that if we're suggesting adding a downvote button to solutions it should lead to something beneficial to the site, and not just because there are some kind of solutions you don't like (which is something demonstrated by a lot of people in the discussion). TYou can always express your own opinion via solution comments, which is infinitely more beneficial to the site than a "downvote" button which has the purpose for you to vent without providing any discourse.

[max1c]

Please note that if we're suggesting adding a downvote button to solutions it should _lead to something beneficial to the site

That's exactly the point. It would be beneficial to the site AND the users learning on the site. I don't have a horse in this race. Why would I care about liking or disliking some solutions? It sounds more like it's your personal opinion here. The site is for people to learn and when terrible practices get upvoted to the top as "Best Practices" not only is it harmful to the new users it's also bad for the site.

You can always express your own opinion via solution comments, which is infinitely more beneficial to the site than a "downvote" button which has the purpose for you to vent without providing any discourse.

In fact, this does happen and it works. When users post bad answers they get downvoted with good ideas being upvoted. Thank you for proving my point.

[FArekkusu]

It would be beneficial to the site

Your view on this issue is very naive. While it may sound beneficial to let people do something about poor solutions which got numerous upvotes, that's just wishful thinking. Have you thought for a second how such feature would work, or considered the impact it would have on the system?

• There're hundreds of katas with solutions having hundreds of upvotes only because they're short, "readable", or "funny"/"cool-looking"/"include a pixel art, heck yeah"/(insert any other stupid reason here) regardless of whether the solution is actually good - your single downvote won't change anything.
• There are short, possibly due to some language tricks, solutions which are actually good/optimal - what are you going to do about these? Are they also "bad"? Should people be punished because "muh readability"? (And this will happen if you haven't realized it yet.)
• Upvotes affect users' honor (it's dumb, but unfortunately we're stuck with it) - what should happen on downvote then? Do people lose honor earned from the upvotes which they received earlier? Do they keep losing honor if the downvote count is higher than the upvote count? Can you be sure that people won't abuse this just like they do with targeted comment-downvoting?
• Are you sure people won't abuse this simply to promote their solutions even more than they can do by a self-upvote?

[hobovsky]

My response originaly posted as an answer in a duplicate discussion:

I think that the downvote button does not solve the problem of bad, upvoted solutions. The "bad" upvotes are there because users who upvote "bad" solutions simply fail to see what is bad about them: they don;t know better syntax, or they don't know that the solution has terrible performance characteristics, or they didn't get past the stage of "one-liners are awesome" yet. Similarly, the "downvote" button would be affected by the same problem: "good" solutions would be downvoted by users who aren't able to tell why a solution is good. This way, many good solutions with good performance or which use proper built-ins instead reinventing the wheel, will end up downvoted as "too mysterious", or as not in spirit of the game.