Meta Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for meta-discussion of the Stack Exchange family of Q&A websites. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
It happens to me so often that my answer gets downvoted just seconds after a new answer has come to light. Is this behavior really accepted?
My perspective is that these kinds of downvotes should not be allowed since most of the time the answers that are being downvoted actually are a high-quality answer.
Tactical downvoting is not nice. However, just because you get a downvote as a new answer is added doesn't mean that the author of that answer is the one who downvoted, and further, a downvote from the author of a competing answer isn't always tactical.
To clarify: if I read an answer that I think is wrong, I will downvote it. In many cases I will then write an answer that I think is right. This is no coincidence. I'm not trying to suppress you or promote myself, it's just that I think you're wrong and I'm exercising a few of the things we do here on SE when someone is wrong on the internet.
Also, my answer will bump the question to the front page. This increases the chances that a whole pile of other people will suddenly read the question and its answers for the first time. If one of the answers is not good, one of these new readers may well downvote it.
Nobody likes downvotes. Your answer might not be the slightest bit wrong. But the most likely explanation for downvotes is that something is wrong with your answer, and having that vote correlate closely in time with a new answer doesn't change the probability of it being a "good" downvote rather than a tactical one.
If you look at the comments and answers on the question you link to, you'll see that they pretty much universally condemn this practice.
Certainly, as a moderator, if I became aware that a user was consistently and deliberately down-voting competing answers then at the very least they'd be getting a mod message. If they persisted, they'd be getting a suspension.
While there is nothing wrong with down-voting all the other answers if they are wrong, it's going to be a rare situation and for it to happen on a lot of the questions you answer is going to start to raise suspicions. Votes should be on the merits of the post itself, not who posted it, not when it was posted and certainly not just because it's competing with your answer.
The Sportsmanship badge to some extent provides an incentive for answerers to vote up competing answers.
I do something similar to @KateGregory sometimes. If I am answering a question, I may downvote another answer if that answer is obviously wrong or of very poor quality, not because it is a rival answer. In fact, I try as a general practice to upvote other answers that are decent. In fact I do want to earn the Sportsmanship badge :).
