Are there some hidden rules I am not aware of that would explain the relatively high amount of downvotes on new posts lately?

Question

Something I've recognized since I've started to be more active again is that it feels like some 80% or so of new posts get downvoted, often pretty fast after being posted. Most of the time I can't find anything in the posts that is so wrong with them that it deserves a downvote. In fact I find that many of the really good answers I am reading lately get a downvote at first. I've also had a few and I feel like this is discouraging for the people who provide in-depth answers.

Obviously it's up to everyone to up- or downvote according to their own opinion. And it's up to anyone to downvote without explaining it. I won't start a discussion in the direction of "You must leave a comment when downvoting". I don't want something like that, I just want to understand why so many good questions and answers are being downvoted immediately. Did some important on-topicness rules change in the last half a year or so? I couldn't find anything when searching through meta and I've seen other users asking themselves something similar. I don't remember seeing such a pattern when I had been active before.

It also doesn't seem like this is a specific target. It's across multiple topics, it's across multiple users, it's across high and low rep, it's across short and long questions and answers, it's across fantasy and technical writing...

I could also understand if it had something to do with really popular questions. HNQs often get a couple downvotes just because there is a whole lot of users that see it so someone at some point will probably find something they don't like.

One example I just randomly picked from the frontpage is Does it really serve a main character to give them one driving want? Every single post, question and answers, has exactly one downvote and it's only been viewed 65 times. Roughly ten percent of the views come from people who interacted with the question. Judging by my past experience there shouldn't be this many downvotes for a topic like this. I can understand if people downvote everything related to torture on WorldBuilding.SE, but this just strikes me as a weird pattern.

Did something change that I am not aware of? It just feels like far more downvotes lately than before and far more than the traffic on the site would imply.

Answer 1

SE generally allows people to use their votes as they see fit, even if a lot of them are downvotes. However, targeted voting (in either direction) is a violation of the rules, because votes are supposed to be for the content, not the person.

Moderators can't see individual votes or, for the most part, distributions. If there is enough voting between particular accounts we can see that, and when that happens we can escalate the case to SE for further investigation. (Employees have access to better information and can invalidate votes if they conclude that there's voting fraud.) We recently detected some voting fraud and some votes were invalidated as a result, but for a broader distribution, where each person only gets a few downvotes, it's harder for them to determine whether it's targeted or the voter's actual opinion. I agree that this is very frustrating (I've received some of this too).

I will ask if SE can review recent voting trends. If, for example, it were to turn out that a use is downvoting every post that hits the front page, for example, it would be harder to believe that it's being done in good faith. If it turns out that the downvotes are coming from somebody who's also doing a lot of upvoting, there probably isn't anything we can do. Mods don't have enough information to know, but I'll ask for help.

Answer 2

I've seen this before on other SE sites. So when I started being active here I assumed it was just common here as well. As you observed, there seems to be no logical reasoning behind it. Sure if a question or answer are problematic or controversial or poorly written you may see some degree of downvotes. But seemingly straightforward and well-written Q&A's will suddenly receive a single downvote across all posts.

I have always taken this to be pettiness. Or spitefulness. Or maliciousness. Or someones cockeyed idea of vindictiveness and an effort to circumvent targeted downvoting. (Meaning spread the downvotes out so the system can't tell you are targetting a single user)

For this reason I am sparing with my downvotes and liberal with my upvotes. I try to silently be a force of positivity. If a question is remotely interesting or useful I try to upvote it. If I gain even a sliver of insight from an answer (and it isn't just plain wrong in some way) I try to upvote.

This sort of voting behavior has been seen before. That link also has information on steps you can take to help mitigate voting fraud. This is also something that can be taken to Meta.SE. I understand employees can look at actual votes and see if a malicious pattern can be determined.

Answer 3

Thanks for bringing this up. I've seen another odd pattern where I'll be on SE and I see several downvotes for different posts of mine come in a fairly short time. Like 3 in 5 minutes. Some of the posts are months old. It feels like someone is on my profile looking at my posts and systematically downvoting them. It doesn't happen like that with upvotes (except for once when my husband was catching up on viewing questions I wrote). If it were outright maliciousness, you'd expect once in a while the system would pick up on the volume and do a reversal. If it is a pattern and not just coincidence, someone's being careful.

As I'm here longer I expect my posts to get more votes overall (because there are more posts to interact with) and some do come from old posts, since people find things on searches and vote on them (which is exactly how the site is supposed to work). But the percentage of downvotes appears to have gone up (I haven't looked at the stats so this is from memory).

And yeah, it suddenly got a lot worse a month or so ago.

Answer 4

I've reviewed the voting patterns on Writing lately and I have seen some patterns:

(The site analytics page is available to 5k users on beta sites.)

Notice that nearly all the voting on the site is upvoting. Downvoting is an order of magnitude less common. I also see there was a spike in voting starting in late February and leveling off by the end of March. In addition, the gap between upvotes and all votes widened around that time.

Interestingly, there was a spike in posting at around the same time:

So the general increase in voting makes a good deal of sense. More posts => more opportunities to vote => more votes. Now that doesn't explain the ratio of downvotes increasing.

I looked at the sample post, which has two downvotes. As an employee, I can look at the individual voting of the two downvoters. I didn't see any particular patterns in their voting records. Without asking them, I'll never know what prompted them to downvote. Maybe they disagreed with the premise of the question. Maybe they don't like Titanic. Maybe they are unhappy with the volume of questions recently. Maybe they misclicked. Whatever the case, I didn't see the targeted or revenge downvoting patterns that would warrant a moderator message and vote invalidation.

Obviously we wish we did know why certain posts were downvoted if only so we can fix legitimate problems. But there are good reasons to let people vote without having to explain themselves. Yes, it means there are hidden rules for downvoting that are unique to specific users. As the site grows, more people will vote in idiosyncratic ways and that's probably a good thing. People will also upvote based on their own criteria and the more voting activity a site has, the more robust it will be against the whims of individuals.

While it might help to reason out what prompts downvotes, it's probably better to use your votes. Get used to the occasional unexplained downvote secure in the knowledge that there will be plenty of upvotes to counteract them. It's democracy in action.

Finally, notice the gap between upvotes and all votes has disappeared again in the last few weeks. If I were to hazard a guess, I'd postulate that downvoters are responding to the increase in posting, which has also leveled off recently. Perhaps there were more downvote-worthy posts during that time. We've certainly seen that general trend on other sites as they see an uptick in activity.