What is it with massive downvoting of [minecraft-commands]?

Question

To confirm my suspicion, I've just counted the average score over the last 100 questions tagged with minecraft-commands. And I came up with -0.87

It seems the downvotes are given regardless of clarity of the question, whether the asker tried something and describes the efforts or not, even upvoted questions frequently have downvotes, and the answers (good, valid answers) are usually given in comments.

Sure, many of the questions are lazy and low quality, but not 59% of them! (that's the percentage of downvoted questions; only 18% is upvoted)

Does someone just hate this class of questions, downvoting them regardless of merit? Can the situation be improved somehow?

As for examples of reasonable questions that got downvoted:

Select entity by certian attributes - specifically, getting a player teleported upon throwing a specific type of item.

I'm trying to do a /give command where i get a crossbow with a custom firework - it's tricky because while the firework does indeed need to be in the player's inventory, the crossbow can be loaded with a particular projectile, and achieving having it loaded with that specific firework through commands seems either tricky or impossible through commands.

How can I set players to different teams? A simple question with an easy answer but doesn't seem to be anything wrong about it.

Minecraft: Keep player from falling - a very reasonable question about levitation or its alternatives; the asker tried quite a few options. The answer is quite unintuitive too: levitation effect with power 255.

Are there commands that can give players permissions like “can open containers” or "can build/mine - a very reasonable question with a reasonable, unintuitive answer.

Is there any way that i can test if a block is in a large area - a reasonable question, and yes, a duplicate, but of a question with terrible title that makes it quite hard to find if you don't know what to look for (the duplicate title actually suggests a wrong answer). Definitely not deserving -4.

Answer 1

My thought about it was that it could be the same old "new users never read how-to-ask" issue. To prove my point I've tried some SQL-fu on Data, here are my results.

1. Last 1000 questions for minecraft-commands:

Average_Score | Score_Sum | Post_Count | Reputation_Bucket
2.188         | 116       | 53         | over 400
2             | 4         | 2          | 301 - 400
1.266         | 19        | 15         | 201 - 300
1.089         | 73        | 67         | 101 - 200
0.061         | 6         | 99         | 051 - 100
-0.484        | -370      | 764        | 000 - 50

2. Last 1000 questions over all tags:

Average_Score | Score_Sum | Post_Count | Reputation_Bucket
3.846         | 1027      | 267        | over 400
2             | 68        | 34         | 301 - 400
2             | 82        | 41         | 201 - 300
2.157         | 261       | 121        | 101 - 200
3.079         | 117       | 38         | 051 - 100
-0.467        | -233      | 499        | 000 - 50

3. Last 1000 questions without minecraft-commands:

Average_Score | Score_Sum | Post_Count | Reputation_Bucket
3.704         | 1089      | 294        | over 400
1.974         | 75        | 38         | 301 - 400
2.024         | 83        | 41         | 201 - 300
2.273         | 291       | 128        | 101 - 200
3.658         | 150       | 41         | 051 - 100
-0.319        | -146      | 458        | 000 - 50

General trend can be seen - new users' questions are not well received regardless of tags, and for minecraft-commands we see ~40% more questions from new users.

Here is main query permalink to play with. One problem with it - I cannot figure out how to get user's reputation at the time of question creation.

Answer 2

I think I should answer this, since I have downvoted 421 posts on this site, mostly questions, mostly minecraft (since I'm most active there) and 4 of your 6 example questions.

The answer mainly comes down to what Schism said in a comment: These questions usually have bad grammar, ramble a bit and eventually give a very unspecific description of what they want, then expect us to do it for them.
This is probably because Minecraft's target group is dominated by small children, who have no patience to read the rules, to put effort into their question or even to use a different wording than they would if they were talking.

Also, most of these questions have a score of -1, which is nothing special, since there's always a bit of noise in the vote behaviour. I know one user who I suspect to have downvoted almost every question that wasn't very good in the past. And they're allowed to do that. I don't think they do it anymore, but were for a long time.

And yes, I do indeed think that 59% of questions with this tag are "lazy and low quality", probably even more. I've already adjusted my behaviour for these: I used to treat all questions somewhat equally, tried to scrape the smallest bit of whatever I understood from them together and at least leave a wiki link or something in the comments (in the first months here I even often wrote a complete answer), but I noticed that it stresses me. So for my own health, I now just change tags if they're wrong*, downvote if it's really bad, vote to close if appropriate and then get out of there. I follow minecraft-commands and minecraft for questions like t h e s e o n e s where I can apply my knowledge about the game to solve interesting problems and to build up a knowledge base for future reference on this site, not for "gimme the codez" questions or ones that can be solved in a minute using Google.

*Usually minecraft to minecraft-pocket-edition or minecraft-bedrock-edition or similar. Or removing minecraft-redstone from minecraft-commands questions. You might notice that there are only 33 left that have that combination of tags, there used to be about 200 before I cleaned that up.

Now to your 6 examples:

• "Select entity by certian attributes Minecraft Bedrock Edition": The first thing I notice negatively is this "get it?", which shouldn't be part of the post. Wow, they made a pun, great. Not important for the question.
  Then they write down a command they tried, which is good, even with code formatting, but then it just ends with "doesn't seem to work right". In what way? Does it give out an error message? Does it do nothing? Does it make your computer explode? Also, that command had multiple pretty obvious syntax errors, which could have probably been easily solved if the asker looked at the error message.
  Then they ask how to differentiate the egg some other way, which is similar to the "XY problem": They ask how to fix their attempt of solving the problem instead of asking how to solve their real problem. In this case other alternatives would be dropping (which the asker excluded for reasons I do not know), shooting a bow, spinning in circles, whatever, there are endless possibilities to trigger something. But to know which one fits the person's need best, we would need more information.
• "I'm trying to do a /give command where i get a crossbow with a custom firework": The only one of the four sentences that doesn't have a grammar error in it has only four words.
  Looking back, I probably shouldn't have downvoted the question, only closed as "unclear", since what I assume the asker probably means is changing what a crossbow shoots, which is indeed more complicated than it sounds. But I don't know for sure, because I don't understand the question text at all.
• "How can I set players to different teams?": This is a very basic question, a quick Google search could have given that person the answer much quicker.
• Minecraft: Keep player from falling: I didn't downvote this question and it's on a positive score, but two people did downvote it. Probably because they assume that everyone heard about levitation 255 already. But I find that it's a decent question: The asker lists different things he tried, he specifies his version, ultimate goal and the problems he encountered. Nothing wrong with that. Another possibility is also that the downvotes were made before the grammar of the post was corrected. But as long as it's understandable, bad grammar alone doesn't justify a downvote for me.
• "Are there commands that can give players permissions like “can open containers” or "can build/mine": I didn't downvote this and the score is 0. The only downvote could have been random or because stuff like this was asked a few times before. But there are many wordings for what the asker wanted, so it's understandable if he didn't find a definitive answer. Alternatively, the downvote could have also been because the asker shows a lack of knowledge about Minecraft, but that's also no reason for a downvote in my opinion, since one of the best ways to gain knowledge is to ask questions.
• "Is there any way that i can test if a block is in a large area": This questions sounds like it might be the XY problem again, but I don't know, since there's very little detail. The only mentioned attempt of a solution doesn't even include a full command and doesn't say what's wrong with it, it should work. They also list no other attempted solution or a reason to check for air (which might help against the XY problem).

In general, I think the better question is: What could be done against the fact that so many of these questions are in fact bad? Obviously we can't just ban all children from this site, they need help, too. But I would actually welcome even more downvotes for extremely bad questions, because then they would be more likely to be picked up by the automatic deletion process, for example at a score of -4 usually.

One thing that I still have planned is making some broad, really detailed FAQs that can then be used as duplicate targets, to save everyone here a bit of headache. For example one of them could be "my super long Minecraft command isn't working" and it would instruct how to reduce it to the minimum reproducible example, how to solve common issues with long commands (like unbalanced brackets, how to de-nest commands (like in one-command creations) and so on.