Is this site willing to curb the abusive downvotes (and close votes)?

Question

I flagged several times serial downvotes that had not been reversed automatically by the time I became disappointed, but was always declined. (There are also many smart downvotes paced well enough not to be automatically detected).

Every post I make immediately receives one or two downvotes.

I have raised similar concerns in different scenarios. I was asked to respect downvotes as personal choices, to refrain myself from playing drama, or to contact SE customer services (which is always hard to reach, either doesn't follow up, or asks me to contact site moderators in turn, at which point I always stop trying).

Either indeed the moderators are impotent as they claim to be, or this site doesn't seem willing to recognize and curb the abusive downvotes (and close votes), and therefore let them flood, as a way to nurture the community.

Thanks.

Note1: I don't solicit upvotes here. I feel uncomfortable with irrational upvotes, and more importantly I can't withstand irrational downvotes.

Note2: I don't think my posts are high-quality. More importantly, I don't think them low-quality.

Answer 1

Tim, I actually agree that your questions sometimes get an undeserved bad rap.

For example, I think this recent question of yours is a reasonable question, but when I first saw it, minutes after it was asked, it was -4 already. It's now net +2, and it was net zero yesterday (when I linked to it in the chat), so it seems like the overall perception of it is that it's fine too. Something is off with how those initial votes came in.

I have answered questions from you. Quite often I found them interesting and an enjoyable exercise to answer.

However, frankly, many of your questions are low quality as the SE system defines it. The tooltip for the downvote button says "This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful". Even with the best will in the world, one or two of those seem like they apply a lot of the time.

(You may not like to keep reading, but please do read the part below the line at the bottom).

• They are often answered in the very next paragraph of the documentation (or even within the passage you quote), or are questions about standard non-technical meanings of a word, or would be resolved by simply running the command at issue: these don't show any research effort - whether you made any or not, people aren't seeing it
• Other times, they, for example, quote some documentation, and then ask about something that it doesn't say, or conflate evidently-unrelated elements: these are unclear, although probably VTC-unclear rather than downvote unclear (to me)
• Still other times they are about such fine details that a reader could quite reasonably wonder what on earth the point is, and often these come in a tightly-packed sequence: these may be considered "not useful"

I don't think it's necessary to vote in that way, but it is within the bounds of how the SE model works.

As for close votes: these seem almost always to be as unclear (addressed earlier) or too broad: both of those can be corrected by edits, which - as you know - put the question immediately back into the reopen queue. Putting a question on hold is not a punishment, it's a reminder to make sure the question is as answerable as possible. The other closures seem largely to be "off topic - can't be reproduced", which is probably the closest of the radio-button options for "premised on a misunderstanding of standard English word or sentence". In those cases the question itself does seem to have been answered by pointing out the issue.

That is constructive feedback: it's telling you something you can do to improve how the questions are received. The close reasons offer suggestions of what to resolve. The downvotes don't, other than the tooltip, but those three kinds of issue are still fairly actionable.

For all that, people should be voting on the questions themselves, rather than on who's asking them. It's clear from the vote reversals you've seen that that sometimes isn't happening, and that question at the top is quite suspicious to me as well. On the other hand, my estimate would be that most of the downvotes on your questions are deliberate and considered, on questions that the voter genuinely believes not to show any research effort, or to be unclear or not useful, and even more so for the close votes.

I suspect that some are annoyed by the pattern of questions you've asked, and perhaps by the response from you to downvotes and closures (e.g. this question itself), and have ended up at best with a bit of a hair trigger and low tolerance for your questions. If they're downvoting on sight, they shouldn't be. Your many positively-scored questions suggest that most aren't doing so, but I do think it's likely that you're experiencing some of it, and probably a bit beyond what the vote-reversal script detects.

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At this point you have over 26,000 reputation points and plenty of successful questions; you're well past all the privilege thresholds and passive reputation growth will keep you there. The votes have ceased to have any impact at all on how you can use the site, but I understand that it still hurts when the system tells you that something you've put effort into is bad somehow, all the more so when it's taking something away from you while it does it (even if you know that what you're losing is meaningless). I don't like it when I get them, and I don't expect anyone else to either.

I have been concerned about your recent posts here, and in comments on the site - particularly this meta question from a couple of months back. As it said, you never know what's going on in someone else's life, and I don't know what's in yours (nor, presumably, does anybody else here). I do worry about the pattern I'm seeing and the comments you've made.

Stepping outside my expertise and anything else about this place, and being uncomfortably presumptuous, I want to encourage you to seek out some someone outside this site to talk to professionally about what you've been experiencing lately here and elsewhere.

I'm not sure where you are or what sort of situation you're in, but there will be counsellors, therapists, etc available and I think it'd be beneficial to work with one of them. If you are being bullied and discriminated against, they can help to find productive ways of responding to it, and generally provide a non-adversarial sounding board.

Please consider it, and take care.

Answer 2

Just so that it's not always @terdon having to be the face for the mods here on this particular issue.

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You've continuously brought this issue up and want/expect the mods and/or Stack Exchange to take some sort of action regarding this. But in expecting this course of action you're assuming that the votes are without merit.

Should we make a similar judgement/assumption with the ~5k upvotes you've received as well, according to @terdon's query?

     

I think the larger issue that you're ignoring here is that a sizable segment of the users here are trying to signal you and you're ignoring that message because you've concluded that it's an attack or that it's unwarranted.

I've long ago stopped answering your questions because I've found them lacking in effort to solve things for yourself first. I've often thought that you were merely asking these simpleton questions as an approach for amassing rep, which breaks no rules and is a perfectly fine thing to do IMO.

But others, I would assume based on the feedback you're receiving, feel that this violates some notion of fair play in their minds, because it treats their time as less valuable than your own.

I feel saying this is somewhat justified because you claim to not care about rep, but are making an awful lot of fuss about it. In addition you've only ever contributed 23 answers to this site, but have asked 1442 (as of 2019-02-08).

Please try and take what I'm saying as constructive feedback to you. I do not want to drive someone away from the site, but I also feel compelled to say something because your behavior is impacting others on the site, and so as a mod I'm duty bound to look out for both sides of any issue.

Answer 3

All I can say is what I've already told you in answer to your flags: moderators have no way of knowing who voted for whom, have no tools that allow us to affect voting (we can't undo a vote) and are therefore simply not capable of doing anything helpful.

We do have tools that give us a high level overview of voting patterns but there is nothing that indicates anyone has targeted you. We have also asked SE to look into this and they have confirmed that there is no sign of anyone targeting you specifically.

So I am afraid there really isn't anything to be done here and there is nothing malicious going on. It is simply that your questions tend to attract a lot of downvotes, but apparently (as SE tells us) this isn't any one user but a variety of users of the site. In other words, your downvotes are "natural": people see your questions and decide to downvote them.

The only thing you can do is try not to ask questions that people feel deserve downvotes. Remember that not all your questions get downvoted. Indeed many get multiple upvotes.

Answer 4

TL;DR: My voting pattern isn't about you. I don't know you, I don't care about you. My voting pattern is based on what I think is best for the site, and the questions that are asked on it.

I'm probably one of the people you think is abusing you. I'm definitely one of the people who tends to vote down your questions, rather than voting up. But not because it's "Tim", but because of the questions.

I only joined the site a couple of years ago (I was between jobs, and bored) so pretty much answered all the questions. It was part of my morning routine; get up, have breakfast, answer a dozen Unix questions, then watch Person of Interest (I'd just found the show and was catching up on Netflix).

Sometimes questions weren't understandable, so I would comment asking for more details, or sometimes the question was almost right, so I would answer them trying to take into account all variations of the meaning that I could think of.

Sometimes the question showed some basic misunderstanding of the concept, and so the question wasn't meaningful. And I'd take that as an opportunity to explain the basics, and how stuff worked. I'd spend hours on it, with examples, proof of concepts, edge cases... I wanted to create the best answers I could, and I had the spare time ;-)

And sometimes, not often, the person writing the question would attack me, and then I'd find the question got edited and rewritten to mean something totally different.

Roll forward to the present. With two years experience under my belt, I notice some common patterns...

An obvious one is people asking for help on their homework. Oh don't I feel dumb for answering those questions, 2 years earlier. Now I just ignore them, or maybe downvote. I can't even be bothered to VTC "duplicate" anymore. (My girlfriend is a director at an Ivy League college, and she tells me the professors there include using StackExchange to answer schoolwork as cheating. Heheheh).

Another obvious one is people asking for answers that can be solved with 3 minutes of google. This is clearly not showing any research effort; they get a downvote.

Then there's those where the question is unclear. If it's only marginal, and I think it can be rescued then I'll comment on it, and maybe downvote. If I think the question is gonna need rewriting from scratch then I'll VTC "unclear".

And finally there's the "WTF does this even mean? When I apple, banana? Huh??" These get a downvote and a VTC.

So I took a look at the questions you've opened and looked at how I responded to them... and, yes, a lot of them have been downvoted or VTC'd.

But not because it was "Tim" asking the question, but because I felt they were bad questions.

Nothing so far has been "Tim" related.

Now a personal comment on you.

When I do leave a comment on your question or try to answer your question, you attack. You play the victim in these threads, but you are the biggest bully I see. You play passive-aggressive (eg your profile comment), you attack people who try to help you, you rewrite questions with nasty remarks in them.

Despite that, I do still try to answer your questions when they are something that doesn't take a 50 page essay (VTC "too broad"). Sometimes you accept them, sometimes you leave comments which make me think you didn't try to understand (e.g. google the concepts mentioned) and just jumped to a "what does XYZ mean?" comment.

I still answer the questions because a goal of SE is to build a library of answers. Whether you appreciate the work doesn't matter. I'm just trying to make it the best library I can, within my limited means.

I'm guessing English isn't your first language, and this may not be helping you (picking the wrong words, so people misunderstand you; phrasing things the wrong way, so people take umbrage). You might want to step away from the keyboard and breathe for 5 minutes before responding; don't say the first thing that comes into your head. Go to the kitchen, get a glass of water, calm down, assume the other person is trying to do the right thing, engage in a construct manner.

In summary, see the TL;DR at the front!

Answer 5

I think some of this is based on a misunderstanding you have of how Stack Exchange works.

I see in your profile you say:

A post without reply and with net downvote(s) or in closed state will be removed automatically. Posts, regardless of their receptions, can serve as references for reducing future mistakes and questions. If you find them useful/interesting, please consider to

• upvote, reopen and undelete those mistreated posts;
• leave posts open, and reopen closed posts

Stack Exchange explicitly states that downvoting and closing posts that don't fit, are off topic, low value, unclear etc is the right thing to do, so they can be cleared away and removed. They don't serve as useful references unless they are well formed. So if your posts are gaining down votes, that is the reason, not because anyone is targeting you specifically.

I have just checked and can see that I have downvoted 4 of your answers - before I even knew who you were from this post. It's because I felt they did not meet the requirements of a well formed, on topic question. I have also upvoted a few of your questions, because they did meet the requirements. That is how this all works.

If you dislike the way votes are cast, then I'm afraid that is not our problem - Stack Exchange is built to allow anonymous up and down votes. And as you can see from your rep - you have got a lot more up than down, so it obviously works.