I have been active on different SO/SE forums for quite a while. I have rarely downvoted anyone. I usually try to    let the person know what is wrong with their question/answer first and help them learn how they need to improve it edit the post myself if the person doesn't know how to do it. report/flag the post if the person doesn't consider the feedback downvote if the OP ignores all above issues   However, I have barely seen the same behavior from other SO users. Consider  for example. There I have asked a question about compiling software on FreeDOS and I didn't ask it on SuperUser because I speculated (wrongly) it will include some programing. I immediately recived some downvotes and flags which led me to write a P.S. :     Unfortunately, the SO is becoming a very toxic environment again. I have spent quite some time doing a lot of research on this question and tried to format it as nicely as possible. But users come and downvote the post and flag it to be closed without even explaining why! This is not right. We are here to help each other not to silence one another. If this question has any issues and you think it deserves downvote, please give me a chance to understand what it is by leaving at least a comment!   As soon as I wrote this I experienced a tsunami of downvotes and flags on my posts and former posts! someone even took the liberty to edit my post and remove this criticize. So here are the points I want to discuss:   what exactly happens in the mind of a person causing him/her to downvote others without giving them the chance to learn why? and why when this behavior is criticized they tend to do it even worse? Has there ever been a psychological study on people's behavior on social media and how they try to punish/silence others? Why SO/SE still has the feature of anonymous downvote without explanation. When there is a flag option what is the benefit of having downvote at all? what is the benefit of having so many SE forums when SO has tags? How flagging a post as off-topic and closing/removing it helps SO community?  why there is no option to move questions across these SO/SE forums if being "on-topic" is so important?    In my humble opinion, these are really important issues we need to fix if we want to have a healthy community. Thanks for your support in advance.
Possible Duplicate:          I have been downvoted for few answers of mine and the person who downvoted me did not leave any comments or reasons to say why I was downvoted. In such cases, how can I find out who has downvoted me and the reason for downvoting?
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