18 votes
Accepted

Is this considered bad attitude?

No, you have done the right thing. With some many questions on the site it's very easy to miss the fact that a duplicate exists, and to be fair the site search isn't as great as it could be. Don't ...
John Rennie's user avatar
18 votes
Accepted

How to deal with negative responses on SE due to personal grudge?

Well, there are a couple of things to say here: Assume good faith: Unless the user in question explicitly told you "I have downvoted your question and deleted my answer because you would not ...
ACuriousMind's user avatar
  • 122k
17 votes
Accepted

Massive downvotes of some questions

There are some effects of highly negative score not related to reputation: A question below -4 will be pushed of the front page (i.e. what visitors see at `physics.stackexchange.com? ), cf. this meta ...
ACuriousMind's user avatar
  • 122k
16 votes

Chosen answers with many negative votes

Part of the problem is that we are not always sympathetic to questions from the less experienced physics fans. In this case the question had attracted two downvotes and no answers by the time I added ...
John Rennie's user avatar
16 votes

The downvote option for questions should be removed?

That's... unlikely to happen, but it is ultimately not something this community can control. The core Q&A engine is managed by Stack Exchange an shared by the 150+ sites in the network, and this ...
Emilio Pisanty's user avatar
15 votes
Accepted

Why is the question on wifi being a force being downvoted so much?

When someone asks "Should X be considered a Y?" I expect them to exhibit some form of understanding of the definition of Y, and some form of understanding of what X is. While one may not ...
ACuriousMind's user avatar
  • 122k
14 votes
Accepted

Re: Downvoting with no feedback

I would interpret the downvotes on the answers to both of those questions as saying don't answer this kind of homework questions and I agree with that perspective. Providing answers to obvious do-...
Emilio Pisanty's user avatar
14 votes

Increase weight of downvotes?

This request has a long history going back to the early days of Stack Overflow. You'll notice that question is marked as declined. It was actually status-pending for months before being declined and ...
dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten's user avatar
14 votes

Is it okay to edit a question (on the main site) to downvote it after you initially upvoted it?

Please use edits to substantially improve the posts they are attached to. Please do not use trivial edits as backdoors to enable site features that are inaccessible to you for some reason.
rob's user avatar
  • 86.3k
13 votes

How many times can I down vote a particular user over in a given time frame?

To be very frank: you shouldn't even be contemplating this questions; you should always vote the quality of the content and never the user who posted it. Nor will anyone tell you what the limits of ...
dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten's user avatar
13 votes

Should we downvote answers that begin with "I think..."?

I think this is a terrible idea.
AccidentalFourierTransform's user avatar
12 votes

Why should there be a negative vote for questions?

Downvotes send a very clear message: this is not the kind of post we want on the site. (If downvotes outnumber upvotes that suggests the opinion is not that of one grumpy curmudgeon but is perhaps a ...
dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten's user avatar
12 votes
Accepted

How many times can I down vote a particular user over in a given time frame?

A few things: The user you refer to has cast quite a few votes, but only about 81.7% of them are downvotes, not 90%. Call this pedantry, but I think it's important to distinguish between claims and ...
HDE 226868's user avatar
  • 10.8k
12 votes
Accepted

Should existing vote tally ever be considered when voting?

Users are encouraged to vote. You decide what are quality posts on Phys.SE and what are not. Voting should always be based on content, never on previous votes. E.g. comfort-voting is strongly ...
Qmechanic's user avatar
  • 196k
11 votes
Accepted

Snobs and down-voters

It's important to say up front that a downvote is not a judgement of you, it is a judgement of your question or answer. A downvote means the downvoter thinks it is not a suitable question/answer for ...
John Rennie's user avatar
11 votes

The downvote option for questions should be removed?

I have a lot of sympathy with your position. I will not usually downvote a well intentioned question and I do think we are sometimes a bit over eager to downvote. But there are a couple of points to ...
John Rennie's user avatar
11 votes

A downvoted question vs. a very well-received duplicate version of the same question!

There is always a random element to voting. Votes not only refer to the raw content of a question but also its presentation: How easy it is to read (due to formatting) and understand, how well it ...
ACuriousMind's user avatar
  • 122k
11 votes
Accepted

What should I do if my answer to a question has a downvote for no reason defined?

Unfortunately, there is not much that you can do other than improving your answer or hoping that the downvoter leaves a comment. Votes are private and there is no obligation for voters to explain ...
Vincent Thacker's user avatar
11 votes
Accepted

How do I write better answers?

Looking at your reputation tab, this seems to be only the second downvote you’ve received after a year on the site. I’ll let other folks comment on the specifics of your answer (which also has an ...
rob's user avatar
  • 86.3k
11 votes

My answer got me -15 points! Why?

The user accepted your answer on Jan 1 at 22:15 (UK time), giving you +15 points, then today they changed their mind and unaccepted the answer so you got a -15 point reversal. Overall your net rep ...
John Rennie's user avatar
10 votes

Can moderator or user with high reputation be held to the rules?

The main mechanism for the reversal of serial voting is automated, because the moderators have access only to summaries of inter-user voting, (not to detailed records) even when our tools alert us to ...
dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten's user avatar
10 votes
Accepted

A greyed answer

This is by design: answers with scores below -3 get grayed out, to indicated that they do not have the community's endorsement.
Emilio Pisanty's user avatar
10 votes
Accepted

How can answerers learn, if the downvotes on their answers are not justified?

Is there a way for moderators to act as intermediaries between users who provide an answer, and users who have downvoted said answer? As a moderator, that's not a job that I want. Users who can't ...
rob's user avatar
  • 86.3k
10 votes
Accepted

Why did someone downvote my question without reading it completely?

All disciplines have their specialised language i.e. terms that have precise meanings. Some of these terms my be unique to the discipline while others will be terms used in everyday life but ...
John Rennie's user avatar
10 votes

Rationale behind downvote button

Low quality questions on the front page send a signal to first-time visitors that this is not a site worth exploring. Downvoting low-quality questions helps to keep them off the front page.
WillO's user avatar
  • 14.8k
10 votes

Why do we still apply the homework policy even when there are many opposite opinions?

There is in fact massive consensus for closing most homework-like questions. The most recent expressions of this consensus are found in this post and this post. Every so often someone complains about ...
ZeroTheHero's user avatar
9 votes

We can see downvotes on answers by seeing the reputation of a user

Only you can see the -1s that come from downvoting. If I look at your reputation history the SE hides the -1s from downvoting so I cannot see them. In principle some careful observation could detect ...
John Rennie's user avatar
9 votes

Should editors share the punishment for downvotes?

No. If the edits were accepted then presumably the edits were considered improvements. The question of when downvotes occur rarely depends on edits: assuming the edits are good, this question would ...
ZeroTheHero's user avatar
9 votes
Accepted

Is this "serial downvoting"?

As the faq on meta.SE says in the section "What if I think I'm the victim of voting fraud?": If the voting fraud is currently happening or has just happened recently, don't worry about it. ...
ACuriousMind's user avatar
  • 122k

Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible