May I simply know the exact reason of downvoting from the voters? It could be helpful to anyone who is new at this community.  Thanks.
1056
Note: If you're looking for a simple explanation as to why comments aren't required on downvotes, see .   I used to get "upset" (though that is too strong a term) when I got downvoted without comment. If my answer isn't good enough then I'd like to know why. Not only does it improve the answer for the OP but it improves my knowledge too.  Where the down-vote has been explained I've found it useful &amp; it has improved my answer, or forced me to delete the answer if it was totally wrong.  So is there any way we can encourage people to leave a comment? Perhaps they don't lose rep if they explain their down-vote?  I must admit though that I haven't always explained my down-vote either so you could call me a hypocrite. I've also grown a thicker skin over the months of using SO (it seems to have come with the higher rep score ;-)), so I'm less bothered about this now.
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As we know, the tactical downvoting (I'm talking especially about SO, as I don't know about other sites) is more and more becoming a serious problem, as I see, the community can't stop this behavior without some sacrificing.  As a suggestion, I think it makes sense to prevent an answerer from downvoting any answer on the same question, this -sure- has a harm, but IMO, it's less harmful than the tactical downvoting issue, and to make the things a bit more easier, we can prevent an answerer from downvoting a question without posting a comment to that answer before.  And vice versa, if a user downvoted an answer, he shouldn't be able to post another one unless he posted a comment first, to prevent working-around that system, so a user can't downvote other answers before posting his own to avoid posting comments.  EDIT, more clarification: I don't say wrong answers shouldn't be downvoted, BUT if you want to downvote an answer and post your own, you'll have to post a comment, so we make sure you're not just downvoting right answers tactically.
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Preamble: I know that 'give a reason when downvoting' is a very common request, and I assure you that I have read these posts and the discussions in them and my request is very different. This isn't about encouraging people to comment and is more about gathering metrics.  I'd like to see a feature whereby people who are downvoted get some better feedback on why they were downvoted, especially given that people rarely leave comments in practice.  So my suggestion is that when user clicks on the downvote, they are prompted to pick from a short list (No more than 5) of common reasons. It would be a popup that replaces the existing "Please consider adding a comment" box.  The user receiving the downvote would see how many people downvoted them for each reason, but not who did it. It would significantly address the issue of people being too lazy to comment or not wanting to comment (for fear of retaliation or any other reason) while helping to ensure the user gets useful feedback.  Perhaps the downvote could also be weighted based on whether or not a reason is picked.  For questions the list might look something like:   Not a question Not relevant to the subject area Trivial question with no research effort Poorly asked question Other   And for answers, this might be:   Nonconstructive or not an answer Incorrect or dangerous answer Poor explanation Doesn't answer the original question Other
97579
I am sure that many questions are not posted because the user has a fear of downvoters. It is true, because many people give downvotes only because of a small grammar error, or a method of programming that they don't like, or because the user posted a question that has a similar one in another place, even if it asks more information than the another similar question.  But the most important case for that is the new users. Beginner programmers that don't really know how to write good code. The people don't understand that and just downvote and shout out "do not use css inline style on the html!!!" for example.  The question is the prejudice that users sometimes have. Having the option of disabling votes  would mean you will be not traumatized if your question is totally non-sense to other people.
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I'm not a fan of the downvoting feature in general; frankly, I think it should be removed from all of the stackexchange sites.  Negative feedback leads to negative results. I recognize that the intent is not to provide a means of giving negative feedback, but that's what downvoting does. "The community's way of telling peers that their content can be improved" isn't an accurate description of downvoting: people who downvote other people with no explanation as to why (the usual practice) generally consider them not their peers, but their inferiors.   I fear that the downvoting feature panders to the worst aspects of human nature, to an extent that far outweighs any possible benefit that it can provide. I recognize that the intent of downvoting is to make a form of constructive criticism available, but that it fails to do. It simply says "this is bad" without any explanation. If someone really wants to offer constructive criticism, he can do so in the comments, or by closing questions with an explanation of how to bring them up to par. If he does that, it is that that has the value, not a downvote that might or might not go along with it.  I submit that the increasingly negative "elitist" reputation of many of the stackexchange sites (stackoverflow, the "bread and butter" site, in particular) is due more to unexplained downvotes than anything else: downvoting is (much) more often than not a way of telling new people that they aren't welcome in the club. This isn't conducive to growth.  It seems to me that the recently introduced admonishment to "be nice" to new members acknowledges the problem without really doing anything about it. It would be given more teeth if the downvoting feature were removed entirely — people have to give a lot more thought to a comment than a downvote decision. Furthermore, the (apparently many) "serial downvoters" who contribute little if anything else to the site would take themselves elsewhere.   Thoughts? What are the positive contributions (are there any?) that downvoting makes to the stackexchange sites?
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I am trying to improve my skill at asking questions, so I would like to ask feedback on a question I asked that was downvoted.    Why do you think I got downvoted?
6150
I'm happy to see the "first posts" facet arriving on the Beta Review system.  I like that it encourages reviewers to make a decisive move on a question or answer, but frankly, I think there should be a No vote, but okay option in addition to the I'm done and Not sure ones.  I think that there are some posts that are perfectly acceptable, but that show no demonstrable lack of effort or lack of clarity that might warrant a downvote.  I am a firm advocate for voting good quality posts up, I just think that forcing an option of voting or making the reviewer throw their work back into the pool untouched (assuming no edits or flags, etc. are needed) may be detrimental in the long term.
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I don't like such kind of questions on Meta, so I will try to make it a good question and describe all with a details.  Today I down-voted  added a comment with explanations why I down-voted it, and flag it as non constructive (my flag was marked as helpful). An hour later  was downvoted, without any comment left about the reason. Yes, that wasn't my best answer, but in my opinion it answers the question. Well, even if somebody considered my answer incorrect he could add the correct answer, or up-vote the competitive ones. I checked the  who made competitve answer, and he didn't get any rep today for that answer.   It was my second down-vote on Stack Overflow, so I was a little bit down, after that. I think who could considered my answer so completely wrong, and that I thought that maybe it was revenge down-vote. So I checked  of the user I down-voted today, and it was clear that he down-voted some answers today. After I checked that that user cast only 19 downvotes in 8 months, so chances were very big that this was revenge down-voting.  I came to this meta, and searched what I should do in this case. I found that most questions about down-votes, were closed as duplicates. After I found , and found that a team member of Stack Exchange suggested to cast a flag for moderator attention, and explain the situation there.  I did that, and create next flag:     I think after I down-voted this question (and a comment about this), the OP down-voted me in revenge; it's clear from his today's reputation and from timing of my down-vote of his question, and time when one of my answers was downvoted. I cannot be 100% sure about that, but if somebody can check this, and point him that it's not the good way to do.   As you can see, I didn't ask for returning any reputation, or banning that user, I just wanted, somebody to point him, that he did wrong. And after I get this respons on my flag: "declined - flags should only be used to make moderators aware of content that requires their intervention." So in the end I also lost 10 points of the flag weight.  After describing all situation in details, I want to know were exactly I was wrong here. And what should I do next time something like this happens?
7455
OK, I know this has been discussed before ,   but I'd like to make a new suggestion.  Problem: drive-by downvoting - people downvote without explaining why. And when you downvote, legitimately, you lose rep, as does the questioner / answerer. This strikes me as being a lose / lose situation.  Previous solutions: e.g.  and  have required forcing comments.  Solution: How about this instead: keep the current system (downvoter loses rep) unless the downvoter adds a comment in which case no rep is lost. I think this is win/win. The downvoter can choose to enter comments but is encouraged to do so, which increases the feedback to the original questioner / answerer.
43868
I understand the purpose of up/downvoting answers -- some answers are better than others, some answers may be wrong, .etc.  With regard to questions, though, there are other mechanisms to deal with "bad" questions:  comments, close, flag.  A poorly written question should be improved.  A bad question should be closed/deleted.  Often, though I see poorly written questions downvoted. I'm not sure what this accomplishes.  I get loss of rep for offensive or spam questions, but for an off-topic question?  or one that is just poorly written?   Why?  It seems to me that rep ought to be based more on answers on a site of this type.   Fundamentally, it seems that rep ought to be based on what you add to the site, not what you ask of it.  A particularly good question does add to the site, but a poor question doesn't really detract from it in the same way that a bad (wrong) answer does. Sure, go ahead and give people more rep for asking a particularly good question, but why punish people for asking bad questions when there are other ways of handling that.  Why not handle questions more like comments and allow upvotes, but not downvotes?  It seems to me that many, if not most, of the downvoted questions are first timers.  It's more likely that your first introduction to the site will be in asking a question, rather than answering. There is a significant risk to alienating new users when their questions are downvoted -- there's a visceral response to seeing that negative number next to your question.  Why not let the close/flag system weed out questions that don't belong and the comment system work to improve poorly worded questions.
25075
Please add some way to opt out of moderator election notifications.  I don't have time to research who deserves my vote and therefore I will never vote.  Since I'm not taking part, I don't want election reminders to show up in my Stack Exchange inbox. They add up the more communities you take part in and almost every notification I've received in the last two months has been related to elections.
40164
Before you disagree with me with a downvote, or just want to be funny, please hear me out. From the :  The upvote privilege comes first because that's what you should focus on: pushing great content to the top. Downvoting should be reserved for extreme cases. It's not meant as a substitute for communication and editing.  I have honestly never seen a downvote reserved for an extreme case. The process is usually 1) downvote post if it's bad and don't comment. (Not much of a process, is it?) As you stay on the site longer and longer, you develop a carelessness towards downvotes (as I have), but for new users, it's really discouraging.  question inspired me to [ask balpha to] make , which is a list of users with 1 rep who have the  badge. That's the closest I could get to new users who deleted their own posts after downvotes came in. Don't get me wrong, I know the argument about being nice to new users very well, but I still believe it to be an issue. And since , users are much more inclined to go the lazy route and downvote bad questions. No alternative measures (see below) are taken, for the most part. Personally, I leave a comment and don't downvote until the asker shows no interest in fixing their post. The only other measure taken to discourage downvotes (on answers) is the -1 rep punishment to the downvoter, which is absolutely meaningless and inconsequential anyways. How are we supposed to educate new users when we don't teach them what to do, don't direct them to the FAQ, and discourage them with downvotes right off the bat?  Instead of voting down: If the post is spammy or offensive — flag it. If the question is duplicate or off-topic — flag it for moderator attention. If something is wrong, please leave a comment or edit the post to correct it.  We claim to discourage downvoting, yet I see answers like  that encourage us to downvote first and ask questions later when a question is simply unclear or effortless. It's just an awful chain reaction. A new user comes to the site asking a question, but that doesn't work out too well, so they get downvotes, delete the question in shame, and don't get the help they deserve as a fellow writer of code and programmer. Strip away the quality of the site for a moment: the core functionality of this site, and the only reason I and a lot of other users are (still) on it, is to receive and give help to/from others. I enjoy making sure fellow programmers get the answer they need, because this site has helped me get mine when I needed them. Quality can still be maintained if content is fixed rather than downvoted more often. So can we stop discouraging new users from continuing to use this site and actually start to discourage downvoting? I think we need to encourage effort towards teaching and helping new users understand the system and why their post is bad rather than slapping them in the face with downvotes that they don't know how to interpret anyways. I'm leaving ways we can do this up to others. My first thought was to increase the punishment for downvoting answers and to no longer make question downvotes free, but those wouldn't be well-received, judging by the history of similar suggestions. .
35225
It looks like this guy  without even knowing it.  I don't get the impression that he was trying to harm anyone with this process.  What about a warning message that triggers after a person upvotes (or downvotes) the same person X times within Y time span (with X and Y being thresholds that are well below the limit that actually results in a vote fraud reversal)?  Say, twice within 15 minutes?  Maybe display a warning pop-up that says:     Whoa, Camel!  It looks like you're starting to perform serial voting on a particular user.  Did you know that    I have little doubt that this guy would have stopped had he been (gently) warned.  Perhaps others will stop, too.
43935
I've downvoted several of the answers on these Meta discussions:       Both questions are typical self evaluations, Stack Exchange runs them on all young Beta sites and as you may have noticed they are essentially polls, a series of example questions from the site that we are supposed to vote on.  Today I noticed that almost all of my votes have disappeared on both evaluations, only an upvote remains in the later one. My votes triggered the serial voting script, something that :      Heh, it appears I just serially downvoted you (I downvoted a lot of the answers here), hopefully the script is smart enough to not reverse my votes. Will check back in 24h, and if it does, I'll rant about it on MSO ;)    My voting behaviour on both evaluations was very simple:   I had the evaluation open in the left monitor, Opened all the example questions in their own tab, in the right monitor, Scanned each question quickly, and voted on the Meta answer (most of my votes were downvotes), Repeat for the next one, and so on...   I didn't spend more than a few seconds on any question, as I'm fairly regular on the site and I've already read all of them while casually browsing the site. In fact, if my memory isn't failing me, I had voted (up/down) and/or commented, and/or voted to close on each of the 20 example questions. I might have spend a minute or two re-reading a couple, but I mostly scanned through them. In any case I think my voting pattern is quite normal, and the script should be somehow tweaked to take serial posts, posted by the same user in quick succession, into consideration, especially on Metas.   Since I had anticipated that the script would kick in, I could have tried to fool it by pausing a bit between votes or trying to look for other Meta posts to vote on, in between voting on the evaluation answers. However I'm a very active voter on Meta Workplace, there aren't many posts I haven't already voted on, and the few that I haven't is probably because I neither agree or disagree with (my opinion on them is simply "meh"). In any case I think my voting behaviour was natural, and although the serial voting script is awesome, this time it caught and reversed a perfectly legitimate behaviour.  Animuson, in , mentions that the script isn't really optimal on Area51 as well:      Yes, please implement this on Area 51 proposals too! Oftentimes a single user would suggest a plethora of "example" questions to their own proposal which are just terrible, yet all of everyone's votes get reversed and the question just sits there at 0. I've noticed several times that my votes have gotten reversed.    I haven't noticed it myself, but it certainly seems plausible, especially early in a proposal's life.  Mysticial found a related discussion, , but it's focused on voting patterns on main sites, where reputation is also a factor. I can understand jumping through hoops to satisfy the script on main sites where, unfortunately, there are a lot of people trying to get some cheap rep or "punish" others with their downvotes, but not on Metas, and especially not on these evaluation posts.   Voting fraud is a problem, and more often than not the script works wonderfully, but in my case it was extremely counterproductive. Critical evaluations are essential for a young Beta site, and their answers typically only get a handful of votes. I wonder how many of these votes have silently gone away...  Fix this please.
63013
Actually this was quite surprising. A casual troll in the Users Page revealed few users with negative vote. One example is here    Then trying to see what could have causes such a low reputation, I peeked inside the Profile Page of this particular User and was surprised to see a decent positive score.    Can someone explain to me how this can be possible?
77125
I'm taking a look at  (now removed), which all seem to be pretty much the same.  Should any be downvoted/flagged, and if so, which ones?
59243
Disclaimer: I understand that down-voting (social discord) is an important part of community building. Communal negative messages help to deter behavior destructive to the group. Down voting places warning sign in the road for new travelers (don't tread here) and to temper overexcitement.  Rant: We techies are a hazing culture. We invest countless hours mastering languages, algorithms and nuances. We accomplish great things. We rub it in people's faces to feel superior. We feel good becoming an "expert". We feel good when we master lambdas or create a great search algorithm.  Admit it, even the humblest among us feels warm and fuzzy when someone marvels at our work. It's validation. And it's not a bad thing.  But the joy of accomplishment has a darker sibling: PRIDE  It's part of what drives us so hard. It's part of every negative decision we make. And it's often at someone's expense!  Looking through posts on Stack&nbsp;Overflow, I see many answers with negative ranking. Many questions get negative rankings too. Many of these questions are repeats of ones asked in the past. The user could have done a more thorough job googling and probably deserves a mild slap.  But some questions are interesting and well thought out. New users usually aren't familiar with the thorough and serious natures of experts who frequent the forums. Some useful and interesting thoughts could be refined with a little help. Instead they're insulted and leave.  This spree of "reckless down-voting" may be hurting our "community"  In searching for my own name, I went through 10 pages of users with similar names and found most had rankings of 1. This means they never did so much as except an answer (automatic +2). Many of them just wanted their answers and no interest in community.  But I wonder about the many users who got "Geek-hazed". I wonder how many "Noob"s were scared away by unnecessary down-voting?  As of this writing I have a "rep" of 75. Barely noticeable compared to the super-users with rep above 32,000. But so much higher than most users ever get. My low score reflects some serious attempts to ask and answer worthwhile questions. But it's only a month of "real participation".  According to this article (from 2009)  what I witnessed in non-participation is nothing new.  Good reasons for downvoting  1) Person didn't even try to figure out answer by coding or serious googling.  Example: How do I validate user input on the client level?  2) Vague question; No code, No error msg  Example: Every time I run my application I get an error  Constructive alternatives to downvoting  1) A clearly new user didn't give code samples but described his error and error messages  Action: Suggest the user elaborate and include relevant code samples.  2) An answer is correct but vague. No examples, not enough detail. Maybe even sloppy English.  Action: Suggest the user elaborate and include relevant code samples.  Question: Do you think gratuitous down-voting hurts participation in our "community"?