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This question is specifically about meta questions. On the main site, I would delete them if I could.

Some of my questions on meta are highly down-voted. Do such questions play any important role for the community in the future? If they do not, deleting them seems like a better choice to me.

What factors should one consider while planning to self-delete posts on meta?

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  • 6
    they tell us what not to do. Jun 18 '19 at 12:55
  • 12
    On meta, I would keep them. A lot of discussions are popping up every few month, good to have a target for duplicate then.
    – BDL
    Jun 18 '19 at 12:57
  • 1
    It’s up to you. As Robert says, they are useful as signals for what the community doesn’t like, but OTOH the majority of mega-downvoted Qs gathered those downvotes for either bringing up a point which has been discussed to death and so yet another Q on the topic doesn’t add information, if they’re so at odds with existing norms and culture that an explicit Q about them is superfluous. By again, you decide, and you can do that on a case by case basis. Under certain circumstances the decision is out of your hands though (eg with an existing upvoted answer, or with more than one answer).
    – Dan Bron
    Jun 18 '19 at 13:00
  • 4
    I personally don't like deleting information: since the votes on meta basically mean "I agree" and "I disagree", the downvotes in a question such as "what do you people think about foo bar baz?", for instance, basically mean that people disagree with your foo bar baz proposal... that's an information. It should be kept. By the way, that is precisely the case of your most downvoted question: "Should a user be allowed to delete his own old revisions on his own post?"... so, the downvotes there mean that the community think "no, they shouldn't". Jun 18 '19 at 13:10
  • 1
    One factor to consider - meta account with all posts having positive score may indicate that the user can't accept any criticism/disagreement with they point of view. Jun 18 '19 at 15:19
  • 1
    @GerardoFurtado It's a bit more nuanced than that. The upvotes could also mean, "it doesn't matter what the consensus is here, this is a good read". Correspondingly, downvotes signal the opposite. Upvotes/Downvotes are a little more clear on feature requests and bug reports.
    – cs95
    Jun 18 '19 at 21:46
  • One other good reason not to delete it is that it can show (to people that search before posting at least) that the question has already been asked (and what was the reaction to it)
    – Kaddath
    Jun 20 '19 at 10:04
  • @BDL then what about questions that are marked as duplicate? I have one with multiple downvotes, which is a duplicate of another question. I still can't delete it.
    – Snow
    Jun 20 '19 at 10:48
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Whether you should delete a question is more or less the same as whether or not you should delete an answer with a negative score. The only real difference is you need to consider whether there's useful information in not only the text of the question, but in the combination of the question and all of the answers posted to it.

In short, if you personally think it's a useful post, keep it, even if others don't agree with you. If you can fix it to make it a useful post, then great. If you've been convinced by others that it's not a useful post, then just delete it.

I also feel the need to point out that meta does in fact have bad posts, and downvotes are used to reflect that. While, yes, there may exist some posts that are extremely well written, well researched, about interesting topics, etc. but that are making some sort of proposal that others feel is not a useful proposal to implement, people like to overstate how often that's the reason a post is downvoted.

It's very common to see posts that either aren't proposals at all, or are poorly researched, unclear, lacking information, or are otherwise problematic. In my experience proposals that aren't worth implementing are more likely to have those problems as well, not less likely. Just dismissing all downvotes on your posts as "people just disagreeing" is...not merited and in my opinion not healthy. At least be open to the possibility that there are other problems with a post.

So if you think that your question is a good useful question, but is simply one in which it is proposing something that required a detailed reason explaining why it's not feasible, then leave it. If it was just not a useful proposal (or not a proposal at all), then consider whether or not the question is actually adding value, and whether you can fix the problems causing it to not be useful.

1
  • Also, the line between disagreeing with a post and thinking that it's a bad post is a blurry one. If a post presents an argument, and I downvote it because I think the argument is full of holes and poorly thought through, does that mean I "disagree" or that I think it's a "bad post"? Is there even a difference between the two, in such a case? I'm not sure there is.
    – Mark Amery
    Jun 20 '19 at 10:05
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Self deletion is ultimately a personal choice.

If you can delete it (e.g. no upvoted answers), leaving it up or not it's up to you. It doesn't harm you, but I can understand that you may not feel great about having a "-X" hanging on your profile.

In the end, it's about you deciding if the question as it is could be useful anyway in any capacity. As a target for future discussions, because despite the downvotes you believe there is a good point or points raised in the question, because comments to the question are insightful or interesting, etc.

If having it there doesn't bother you, and it doesn't attract noise and grief, I'd leave it up to the community.

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    "Self deletion". I must say that deleting posts is not the first thing that pops into my head when I read that :p
    – Gimby
    Jun 18 '19 at 15:15
  • 3
    Maybe you are right. It sounds alright to me, but what do I know? I usually wait for Peter M. to come around and fix my posts, but of course anyone who knows better is welcome to improve on my English.
    – yivi
    Jun 18 '19 at 16:03
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Personally, I would say it depends on your view of why the downvotes exist. If you feel that the downvotes are people showing they disagree with your argument, personally I'd say leave it. Others may have the same idea in the future, and can either chime in on the conversation, or at least see the pre-existing community reaction to it. Both of those things, I feel, have merit.

0

Depends what it is. If it's a feature request or proposal that people didn't agree with, then you should probably keep it up. That way, if someone's thinking of proposing something similar they can see that it was already rejected in the past and they shouldn't propose it again. Otherwise, people might keep proposing the same thing without realizing that it was already discussed.

Remember that Meta voting is different than main-site voting. The fact that people ended up disagreeing with a proposal doesn't mean that the post itself isn't useful.

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