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So I received several notifications at the same time indicating "-2" in different answers of mine (old and new). I never understand why this happens. Is it that somebody is skimming at my answers and downvoting me every time? Is it a user that was banned and the positive votes were erased? What is it?

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    $\begingroup$ You should be able to see in your reputation tab whether the reputation losses are due to downvotes or something else. $\endgroup$
    – ACuriousMind Mod
    Apr 6, 2022 at 12:51
  • $\begingroup$ @ACuriousMind it only says "downvote" $\endgroup$
    – Mauricio
    Apr 6, 2022 at 12:52
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    $\begingroup$ meta.stackexchange.com/q/126829 may help. If the automated systems function properly those will be reverted at some point. $\endgroup$
    – Jon Custer
    Apr 6, 2022 at 12:56
  • $\begingroup$ See also this post about why such votes might not be reversed. $\endgroup$
    – rob Mod
    Apr 6, 2022 at 16:30
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    $\begingroup$ @Mauricio If it says "down vote" then it was due to a down vote. If it was for a different reason then it would tell you that reason. $\endgroup$
    – BioPhysicist
    Apr 7, 2022 at 1:40
  • $\begingroup$ @BioPhysicist I guess so, but -2 means two coordinated downvoting users? Or somebody suddenly changing their upvotes in several questions to downvotes? $\endgroup$
    – Mauricio
    Apr 7, 2022 at 9:35
  • $\begingroup$ It tells you which item has the down vote. A down vote is -2. If it switched from up to down you would lose 12 points, since an up vote is 10. $\endgroup$
    – BioPhysicist
    Apr 7, 2022 at 11:26
  • $\begingroup$ It is unlikely to be the reason, but one of them could benefit from some copy editing (including eliminating the run-on sentence near "if a theoretical blackbody"). (I am not willing to bump it.) $\endgroup$
    – Peter Mortensen
    Apr 7, 2022 at 18:15
  • $\begingroup$ @PeterMortensen that was not even in the bunch of downvoted ones but I see your point there. $\endgroup$
    – Mauricio
    Apr 8, 2022 at 17:17

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I'd preface this by saying that I don't see a particular reason why you got those downvotes all on the same day. The answers, at a glance, seem OK. Maybe a moderator or admin could have a look to see if you're being downvoted by one individual. I'm neither so I cannot investigate further.

That said, as far as I recall the system automatically detects when someone is going through one user's questions and voting on them. This (apparently) happened me in the past and the system will automatically reverse them if it detects them as such a pattern, which it did do sometime later (may have been days) in my case. So maybe give this a few days.

It's not uncommon to get votes up or down out of the blue on older questions and answers. That's pretty much the site working correctly as it's supposed to keep old questions and answers to help peopel with the same or similar problems.

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    $\begingroup$ As a further precision -- if one receives multiple downvotes in a short timespan and there is a suspicion that it may be a downvoting pattern coming from a single user and based on the authorship of the posts as opposed to their content (which is forbidden by site rules) then it is perfectly reasonable to raise a custom moderator flag on any of the affected posts asking the moderators to look into it. $\endgroup$
    – Emilio Pisanty
    Apr 13, 2022 at 19:40

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