Is there any way I can find the specific reasons my question is being down voted for?  I get it that I am not communicating my questions adequately but without specific feedback it is hard to improve.  Apparently down votes are not close votes.    But where do I see the close votes?  [Update]  My question is not about how do I work out for myself the problem with the question I asked.  The question is about whether the reason for the down votes can be looked up.  (They can't be as I explain below )
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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?
101810
If I've already voted to close a question, it would still be nice to see the details of others' votes — the suggested migration if it's being marked as off topic, or the suggested duplicate if it's being marked as an exact duplicate, for instance. Instead, I only see "You have already voted to close this question" and the overall category.
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I've been wondering about this ever since I signed up on SO. With answers, it's easy to determine what to upvote. Is it helpful, is it informative, is it correct?  None of that really applies to a question though. So which criteria are we supposed to use for upvoting questions? (And for that matter, which purpose does it serve? Upvoted answers are listed first, so here the effect is obvious. What difference does it make whether a question gets upvoted?)
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One of my questions got closed, as it was very similar to some other posted questions (though I don't feel the linked questions answered what I was trying to ask).  There's no point to the question staying online, as it doesn't answer anything, so I was going to delete it - but if I do that will it remove the reputation of the helpful answerers I want to upvote?
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My question was downvoted but, it still listed the question at 0. I lost rep and am just curious if this was a bug.  Question:   Question List:
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Problem People post a bad question, for any of the following reasons:  Not researched Off topic Poorly written/formatted No sign of any attempt to solve problem Classic help vampire question etc  This gets downvoted and often without comments. It's exhausting and tiring work to constantly coach newbies about how to improve their question, because most don't bother to update and oftentimes the only response you get back is &quot;f you why u so mean&quot; types of feedback. Suggestion Whenever a question from a user with less than 50 reputation receives a downvote, automatically generate a comment from the Community user which says:  Welcome to Stack Exchange! You might have noticed your question received a downvote. Voting here is anonymous, but you can find possible reasons for this  as well as suggestions for how to improve your post. You may also find it helpful to read the [FAQ] to better understand what types of questions are on/off topic.  Note the link to &quot;here&quot; can link there or to a more comprehensive &quot;what does it mean when I got downvoted?&quot; post. The [FAQ] link would be to the site on/off topic section. Reason this resolves problem If I downvote a question, I want to help users learn but I am not going to try to search for the diamond in the ruff constantly. I don't think I'm alone in this. Adding customized comments is a lot of work. There are a ton of crap questions posted on SE. Honestly, I don't care that I'm &quot;supposed&quot; to be willing to post personalized, &quot;how to improve your post&quot; comments. It's a pain to constantly put these on questions when the majority of the time they get ignored anyways. Another problem is that if you do post a comment trying to help, you often get attacked by the asker and blamed for all the other downvotes. This is frustrating and not a positive reinforcement. But I will upvote a comment that gets autogenerated as a &quot;support&quot; type of thing, because it is very easy and painless. And, honestly, if someone gets a comment like that explaining how to improve their post and doesn't bother to update their post or request clarification I really, really, really don't care about their feelings being hurt.
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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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To what extent I am free with my voting?  And - especially - with downvoting.   I came into argument with another user on the reasons for the voting. So, I decided to ask.  Beside usual awful no-research-effort questions and quick-and-wrong answers, I am often voted down for the answers you would call correct ones:   When I think there shouldn't be answer at all (helping the OP to shoot himself in the foot or feeding a help vampire)  To negate an over-upvoting craze for the silly answer on even more silly question.   So, the question is - what you think on these reasons?   And - bonus question - is there any difference in the policies for the voting up and down?
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I have seen a few  here on Meta&nbsp;Stack&nbsp;Exchange that cover parts of this, but they are often too local, and none of them seem to cover all the relevant scenarios.  I will break it up into multiple parts in order to make this more specific:     When should I vote on a question:   What are the qualifications for a question to be deserving of being up-voted? When shouldn't I vote up on a question? What are the things that would cause a question to need to be down-voted?   How should I go about down-voting the question (do I wait a little while to give the OP a chance to change it, or do I down-vote it immediately)?  When shouldn't I vote down on a question?  When should I vote on an answer:   What are the qualifications for an answer to be deserving of being up-voted? When shouldn't I vote up on an answer? What are the thing that would cause an answer to need to be down-voted?   How should I go about down-voting the answer (do I wait a little while to give the OP a chance to change it, or do I down-vote it immediately)?  When shouldn't I vote down on an answer?  When should I vote on a comment:   While votes on comments do not affect reputation points, it might be useful to new users to know when to up-vote them.    It seems that a full, comprehensive list of these would be invaluable to new users looking to figure out how the voting system works, but this list seems to be missing from the meta site.
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The following scenario happened to a question of mine today:   I asked a question to a topic I'm pretty new to. Someone answered the question, it absolutely satisfied my points, so I upvoted and accepted it.   But a few minutes later he got heavily downvoted because (as I understand it) the way he explained the points were completely wrong and they said his words just show he has no clue about the topic.  So he deleted his answer, which made me sad as I thought it will be lost.  But it wasn't.  His answer is still in the question. It has a weak colour, as an answer has of my own after I deleted it. But why? Is this just to me, as I'm the one who upvoted it? Or is it because at the point he deleted it, it was the accepted answer?  And is this just visible to me?  Or anyone can still see it?  And I also noticed he still has the +2 rep he got left from his answer (after downvoting) so is this really a deleted answer?  What's going on?
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I recently noticed (and ) a pattern of systematic downvoting by one user against all my questions and answers.  I have honestly no idea what the user's reasons or motivations are, since we have not interacted at all, barely even crossed path on the site (both answered the same question once), but he is clearly targeting me, not my content (which there is no physical way he could have read entirely during his downvoting sprees). He has not left a single comment on any post to justify his downvotes, nor has he replied to my polite requests to explain himself and/or stop this.  His first wave of downvotes was automatically reversed by the system yesterday, and I would have left it at that... But he has been at it again today, and just seems to have no other activity than downvoting my every contributions, which is getting a bit old, to be honest. This really isn't about the reputation points (which get returned each time by the system anyway), but I think a verbal notice enjoining him to play nicer with the community could go some way...  Because this particular form of abuse only has to do with votes, not post content, I don't think there is any way to flag him within the site (?). Also, because  is still pretty young, it appears we do not have any moderators yet (pro tempore or otherwise)... Would any meta-SO moderators mind taking a look at it?  Edit: somehow missed  when posting mine. Though I do not know what the policy for redundancy is, with support-requests... Please if necessary, feel free to close this question and I'll happily repost over there.
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If you add a comment explaining why you downvoted - and I mean a long-ish comment which goes into a bit of depth to explain the issue you have with the answer - your comment gets rejected, and a dialog box pops up saying:     Don't comment on your downvote. If you think this post can be improved, please offer specific guidance.   That's just wrong, since:   Downvotes without comments are antagonistic and somewhat hurtful (for posts written in good faith). You might well be offering specific guidance in the downvote comments. It's much better for the downvoter to leave a sub-optimal comment with some feedback then to be discouraged by this message and not provide any feedback.   Instead, the comment should be accepted (except perhaps for a very brief "-1 wrong"-style comments), and the message could say something like:     When commenting on a downvote, try to explain how this post can be improved, and offer specific guidance.   The comment should remain in edit mode to encourage it to be edited, but canceling the edit would leave the comment as-is (again, except for the case of problematic/very brief comments).  Notes:   This question focuses on the specific scenario of a meaningful comment being rejected, and on the rejection message. This is distinct from how to encourage meaningful/positive criticism in general. If it's the "-1" indication that is super-bothersome to people, then either this should be removed from the comment (with the rest of it left), or it should be made very clear that is the reason the comment can't be accepted i.e. "don't explicitly mention the downvote in downvote comments" rather than "don't comment on downvotes".
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Since "" we now have the possibility to retract close votes.   However, as mentioned in "" there is no indication when looking at a question to see if I have already cast such a close vote.  Therefore, could we have a UI improvement to show this? Adding some image with freehand circles to improve visibility.
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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
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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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I recently had a  which attracted 1 close vote. I don't know why this vote was cast. If I have not conformed to the site's protocol in any way I am left 'none the wiser'.    Should it be made mandatory for a user to comment on why they are voting to close a question?  If this site is to remain 'clean', part of this will be achieved incorporating processes that educate users.
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I want to search for new downvoted questions to improve or flag them.   I tried in the searchbar: votes:-1 is:question   but votes:XX only works with positive numbers. I can't query for downvoted questions. Is there a work-around to this? If there's not, should this feature be added?