What is wrong with my question?

Question

Sometimes I don't understand how voting works. I asked this question and got downvoted. I don't mind being downvoted, on the contrary, if my question does not meet the SE standards I think it deserves being downvoted to oblivion.

Thing is, every time I ask a question on SE I always do two things beforehand:

1. I check to see if my question is already answered
2. I search for similar questions to check the accepted format and see if this kind of questions is accepted by the community

i.e. This question has more than a hundred upvotes and it's basically the same question but for a different app.

So my question is, what is wrong with my question? I honestly don't mind the downvotes, I legitimately want to know what I did wrong.

Thank you.

Answer 1

We recently had a post here called “Is (x) Secure” Question Anti-Pattern. I don't really agree with it, but the consensus is: yes, it's an anti-pattern. The answers there can likely help you.

Regarding your concrete question:

First of, it's really two questions:

• how can I determine the security of a product
• what is the security of specific product X

The problem with the second question is that it is hard to answer if taken exactly as phrased. The reasoning goes: How should we know if it's secure? You can't really proof the security of a complex software.

Of course, your question could also be interpreted differently: Are there known vulnerabilities in software X or have there been uncustomarily many vulnerabilities in the past? Has there been a code audit? Is software X build by security professionals? etc. If you mention these questions explicitly in your post, it might be easier for some to answer it (although as you also asked how to determine the security of a product, you might not know that this might be questions you want the answer to).

You could also put a different focus on your question, eg by asking if "military grade" has any real meaning or is only a marketing term, if it makes sense to use aes256 in this situation, etc.

If you specify what exactly you want to know, you will likely get better answers.

As to the other question: it likely got on the hot questions list and got upvoted because of that.

Answer 2

I think there are many qualitative differences between your Splikity question and the referenced Telegram question.

Before going into specifics, let's keep in mind the tooltip that is displayed when you mouse over the down arrow for a question in the web app:

This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful

When I look at your question, the first thing I notice is that you reference a relatively unknown service and don't provide any links. That means that everyone who is to respond will need to do a search themselves. Compare this to the Telegram question that is full of links to the products main sites as well as to specific documentation links. I feel this both shows strong research on the Telegram OP's part, as well as makes the Telegram posting more useful to future viewers.

Your question of "Is Splikity actually secure?" turns out to be really hard to answer. If you look through the main site, you'll see tons of comments asking questions like "Secure for what?" and "What is your threat model?" We just don't know how to evaluate such a question. On the other hand, the Telegram question asks "Is Telegram more secure than WhatsApp?". So the possible answers are "Yes", "No", and "Telegram is more secure in terms of A, B, C while WhatsApp is more secure in terms of X, Y, Z." IMO, that makes it a clear question.

Note that I do not think that the number of votes on the two questions is an indication of their relative quality. That's largely due to the popularity of the WhatsApp app (the WhatsApp question has nearly 1000 times more views than the Splikity one) as well as details about how StackExchange sites work (eg: @tim's guess about it becoming a "hot" question).