I don't get downvoted often, but it has happened.

My sentiment matches yours -- In one case I absolutely could not figure out why I was downvoted. I'm pretty good at figuring things out, and in the one or two other cases where I noticed a downvote, it was pretty clear I hadn't added anything useful to the conversation, and probably said something a bit snippy.

But I had one where I was absolutely unable to ascertain what was wrong -- and I seem to recall it had been downvoted more than once, so it wasn't just a bad hair day drive by.

The irony is I posted a response asking why I had been downvoted, and that post got downvoted.

So I clarified with another response, asking for an opportunity to improve my posting style. That post also got downvoted.

I finally realized I was only feeding trolls who were, for whatever reason, not going to help me. So I stopped commenting on it (as I was dangerously close to being a troll myself at that point), and eventually others took pity on me and upvoted them.

I still have one sitting at -2, a nice reminder to not take it personally LOL.

Still, watching variations on this discussion over the years I have been here, I am forced to agree with tye -- I can't see any solution that doesn't have an equal and opposite reaction component. Improve one aspect, another goes a bit further south.

I am unfortunately also of the opinion that trying to implement a whole infrastructure under it a laWikipedia or what have you would simply be a lot of effort for almost no gain.

A drive by downvote (assuming the reason is not already posted by others) is less helpful than one with a reply, but it still serves a few useful purposes -- not the least of which is to remind us to not take it personally.

Most of the time, if you are creative enough to work well in Perl, you're probably smart enough to deduce at least the general reason for a downvote. My advice: 

{
    my $insight = &UseTheForce::glean(\%downVote);
    if (defined $insight)
    {
        &ObiWan::learn($insight);
    }
    &ObiWan::moveAlong();
}

[download]

In reply to Re: Negative voting by marinersk
in thread Negative voting by mtmcc

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