For the past few months, every one of my questions (total of eight) have been downvoted almost immediately after posting.  If they are poorly written questions or even if asking a question for something that shouldn't be attempted, I deserve and welcome the downvote.   I am not paranoid or a conspiracist, and while I have zero proof, it appears to have being done by a single individual.  My reason for thinking so is:  This didn't happen in the past and now is happening 100% of the time. A single initial downvote occurs about 4 hours after the initial post. They are downvoted only once, and are often later voted up. Whoever downvotes never leaves a comment.  In an attempt to learn whether I am doing something wrong and deserve these downvotes, I've started leaving comments asking the reason for the downvote.  Not only do I not receive a reply to my comment, my comments are deleted by someone. Yesterday, I asked , sure enough it was promptly downvoted, I left a comment but this time saved a screenshot of it, and like the rest it was gone by the time I woke up in the morning.  I have no formal software education and owe all that I have learned from the many generous members of this site, but now dread asking a question.  I am also not concerned about the loss of two votes, but I am concerned that questions with negative votes are less likely to be responded to by others, and feel I am now wasting my time asking a question. What could I do?  As I see it, several options are:  No longer be a member of the stack platform.  Hopefully, not necessary. Delete my existing account and create a new account.  If so, will I need to use a different email? Aggressively add large bounties until I have very few votes and hopefully fall off their radar.  I have started doing so with no avail. Have someone who can query the DB determine whether it is only a single individual who is systematically downvoting my questions and deleting my comments (I don't even want to know who) and if so ask them to stop.  Thank you in advance for your advice.
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While browsing Stack Overflow, I noticed that I lost a lot of reputation:        Is this serial downvoting? Will it be corrected by a rep-recalculation? How often are those done?    Here's a second instance:
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Am I really forced to ask a question before gaining reputation to vote up answers that I find helpful?  I've used StackOverflow for years in my JavaScript development, and I see myself as a pro. But I always find my questions already been asked and answered, therefore never had the need to ask any questions, but I still want to vote up stuff that I find helpful. But I have not enough reputation to do so.
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Let me say first that I am fairly new here (about 3 weeks) and absolutely love Stack Overflow. At first I let some of the negative attitudes get to me a little, left a few snarky comments, but that phase has passed. I see the tremendous value for this site in the long run and sincerely do want to help make it a better place.  I find myself going for  the downvote very frequently -- currently about 35% of my votes are downvotes. I even make an extra effort to upvote good content to offset this a bit, so the number should probably be more like 60%. I always try to leave constructive comments and try to help out the confused ones who are really trying.  I truly can't tell if it is just me, or if these folks deserve it. I don't know if you guys noticed, but there are a lot of really bad questions being posted, and a lot of people trying to pass off things like "use jQuery", "use Firebug", and "use Google" as good answers (and getting upvotes!). I even saw someone copy/paste my "What does Firebug say?" comment as an answer and get 3 votes within moments. Sometimes This answer is unclear or not useful just doesn't do it justice.  I feel like some of the people just drive me nuts, but then again I feel this way IRL :) Am I being too harsh, or is it really that bad on SO? Has there recently been a surge of new users, and the quality of content is degrading, or was it like this in the "good old days"? Have I perhaps misunderstood the expected behavior on Stack Overflow -- should I just ignore these crappy questions and answers rather than downvote them?
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offers an answer to &quot;How to report Sock puppets who upvote their own posts&quot;.  describes revenge voting.  Recently, I've downvoted an answer and added a comment. After submitting my answer to the same question, I noticed that the downvoted answer has been upvoted (within 2 minutes, probably a sympathy vote, I thought). I added more explanation to the downvoted answer, because the answerer believed that his answer was correct. A few minutes later, I received a downvote for my top upvoted answer. My answer became accepted, for which I received another downvote. I verified (Data explorer) that the specific user did not add new downvotes. So, I suspect this user of having a sock puppet, since the order of events were too coincidental.However, since the sock did not upvote the owner's post, flagging the post will probably not help. So, how can moderator's attention be requested for this case? Attachments: Comment chain:  Reputation mutation (the times do match):
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It is incredibly rare that I downvote on this or any other community site. I would rather just ignore the item. However, occasionally some very bad advice is given that is worthy of a downvote. Why should this adversely affect the reputation of the person who downvotes?
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I recently posted an "answer" to a self-asked and answered question with basically no votes. I was hoping to ask the poster a specific question about his code, but a moderator deleted it basically saying that it wasn't an answer and I should follow the rules.   This happened to me twice now, except the first time I wasn't deleted, just down-voted into oblivion. How am I supposed to ask questions and participate to earn reputation if I don't have any reputation to ask questions/participate within the guidelines? I came very close to 50 reputation points and then people went through and voted down my discussions with the OP.  This is almost akin to the "you can't get a job without experience" conundrum, and I feel an easy solution would be to lower the amount of reputation points required to comment on posts. It's ridiculous that this community is so hostile to someone who is only trying to contribute instead of just taking without giving back.  EDIT: Thanks, to whomever went through and voted up enough things to get me to 50 reputation points!
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I downvoted  and now really can't say why, so I wanted to remove my downvote. However, I get the message:  You last voted on this question yesterday Your vote is now locked in unless this question is edited  Why is this? I don't think I voted on it multiple times, and even when I did, I can change my mind, can't I?
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A downvoted and subsequently removed post showed  as being -1, which is clearly wrong.  The  was the only post affecting my reputation since the last view (as can be seen by the yellow shade), so it should have been 0.
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As a new user, I find it impossible to contribute to the community or to even begin contributing. I know why the reputation system is in place and I respect it, but at the same time it is too hard on new users.  It started with me wanting to upvote a question...     "Vote Up requires 15 reputation"   Just to appreciate a good question that helped me I need 15 rep? OK..., so I find out how I can get reputation points. More or less, I need to ask a question for +5 and add an answer for +10. I don't have any questions at the moment and I don't want to spam a random question, but I did happen to have a slightly different answer to the earlier question that I wanted to upvote. So I try to answer...     This question is protected to prevent "thanks!", "me too!", or spam answers by new users. To answer it, you must have earned at least 10 reputation on this site.   Now... I know this doesn't apply to every question, but at the same time, this means I'm forced to answer yet another question, and I don't want to go around looking for random questions and spam irrelevant answers...  Now I'm stuck. So I try to talk to some other users in the chat rooms about how to go about getting reputation points and how they first started. I entered into a "casual chat room".     You must have 20 reputation on Meta Stack Overflow to talk here.   Yes... I can understand why this is enforced, because we don't want new users to spam chat rooms, but all I wanted to do was ask for help. So I can't even talk to anyone about my newbie problems. So okay, I'll just settle for upvoting comments in the question that helped me. I don't see an upvote hover-over button so I can't even do that.    So now I'm stuck at 1 reputation point, unable to cross that 15 rep barrier, and even after posting this question I'll only have 6 rep points and still unable to do anything, and I'll be forced to look for questions to answer. Yes, I should be contributing to the community, but I shouldn't need to begin answering or making questions to upvote questions and answers. This only spurs more spam/irrelevant answers if anything.   Very, very, very new-user unfriendly.
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I like the community and appreciate the great service it's been to me over the past few months.  Sometimes I want to show my support for a great answer or comment, but I can't because I'm a new user and have only 1 reputation. It seems like the only way to gain the requisite 15 reputation (for voting) is to ask questions?  Until now I didn't have any questions that weren't already answered by the community. Is this the only way? Won't this one day lead to no new users not being able to participate?
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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?
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I am sure this scenario is familiar to all of you.  You click an unanswered question and after reading the question, you want to help and answer. After you answered, you remain the first and only answerer with a solution.  After 15-20 seconds from your answer posting time, another answer comes up, suggesting exactly the solution you have suggested, but with more text (not necessarily more detail).  After a minute, more answers pop up with, again, exactly the same solution you have suggested.  After an hour, your answer gets no votes, but the other answers each get at least 1 up-vote, and the one posted right after yours not only has the most votes, but is also accepted.  What would be an elegant solution to stop this? I am sure I am not the only one who is annoyed by this situation.  After speaking to others about this situation, one of them happened to mention in passing about hovering the mouse over the time of the posting to see the accuracy of the time posted, which I did not know about.
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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.
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Possible Duplicate:          Is down-voting on SO supposed to be anonymous? I ask because it does not seem to me to be.  Example:   I asked a question today. I got 3 good and 1 mediocre responses. I voted up the two that helped me and accepted the one that worked best. A while later, several new comments from one person appeared, to which I responded (since they were questions for me), and then that same person posted a new answer. This answer was crap. The person missed the whole point of the question and gave vague "pseudo-code" (and calling it that is generous) that basically restated my question.   Though I try to use down votes sparingly, especially when someone takes the time to answer a question I asked, I really want to down vote his answer. However, if I do, then my "reputation" will report "-1 downvoted" today. Since we've been going back and forth in the comments (in my failed attempt to explain the question to him), it's fairly likely that he'll peg me for the down vote.   In rumaging through the his reputation, I noticed that he gets down voted a lot. Moreover, he often votes down things on the same day as he gets down voted. Looking at a few recent questions where he posted an answer that was down voted, it's pretty clear that he (often successfully) down votes questions or competing answers when he is down voted, perhaps based on comments or, as is easier, based on profiles where down votes are recorded.  In this particular case, it's worth it for me to down vote him because (1) it's a stupid answer, (2) I don't live and die by my SO reputation, and (3) it really wasn't a great question that I asked. However, this does bring up the larger point that perhaps a date should not be associated with a down vote.
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If a user is the type of person to consecutively get downvoted to potential negative reputation, so be it. What's the reasoning to maintain a minimum of one?  One reason that may justify this is of trying to not deter new users from the site who haven't read the FAQ and unknowingly and wrongly ask or answer a question. But most of us acknowledge this and not downvote in such a scenario.  So what's the reasoning behind this lower bound of 1?
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Downvoted, unanswered questions have been subject to automatic deletion for a long time. The same is not true of downvoted answers.  On Super User, we have  posted before the beginning of this year still in existence. Over two thousand of those are scored at -2 or below, having been downvoted by multiple people.  I see no reason to keep these answers around. Based on the votes, they have helped nobody. They're just sitting there, being pointless, borderline-NAA, or otherwise bad. Low quality (but not flag-worthy) posts aren't actively harmful, but don't provide a good image for the site. Additionally, I think people would be a lot more likely to downvote bad things if they knew there was a good chance for the -1 to be refunded in the future if somebody else agreed. (And hey, the poster would get the -2 refunded as well.)  To prevent people from adding single downvotes to cause quick deletion of things they don't like, it would probably be good to require a score of at most -2 before an answer is eligible for auto-deletion. Accepted answers (that aren't self-answers) shouldn't be deleted, since they helped someone. A reasonable time frame for the deletion of -2 answers would be a month after they hit that score; the process would optimally be accelerated by additional downvotes and slowed significantly by any upvotes.  I understand now that some downvoted answers should stick around to show an example of something subtly bad. To prevent those from going away, the presence of numerous comments or somewhat-highly-upvoted comments could be a factor against deletion. I still believe that many downvoted answers are just mediocre/useless and not representative of any common misconception. (See the Super User search linked above.)  Of course, such deletion shouldn't apply to meta sites, where downvotes are overloaded. I think both child metas and Meta Stack Exchange should be excepted from answer auto-deletion.  Otherwise, please make the Community user delete negatively scored answers after a while.
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I am not a fraud, I have no acquaintances here whatsoever. I love reading questions and answers here and upvoting what I feel is cool. Sometimes I'm in awe of some answers and questions posted here. So I do see into users' profile and open their top questions and answers, and if I like them I upvote.   Number of votes:  Mostly up to 5 questions or answers (may be at best 10).   Mode:  When upvoting (or downvoting) in the opened links, I do not restrict my votes just to that user, but to all good answers and questions I find in that link. Also I do not open the profiles of someone I remember I had visited once.   Am I susceptible to be caught for serial voting? Is reputation gained from my votes deducted from his profile in this scenario? I just don't want my votes to be wasted, hence asking.. I went through  two  but hadn't got enough clarification.