On this site, I've not seen a whole lot of very upvoted questions, unlike on other sites.
But in the past couple of days alone at least two questions have been downvoted up to 26 times. I personally took very long to get to even the rep I have now on this site.
Why do you think that is? Is this site really that controversial?
Meta is a strange, slightly odd, fickle beast.
It's kind of the internet equivalent of the agora – it's a chaotic place where ideas are brought out, argued over and occasionally there's a bar fight or two.
Critically as the prototype meta, we have folks voting meta-style (to agree or disagree), on topics of discussion (which don't do as well on main sites), announcements (which strictly are not questions and other such curiosities), but we have reputation like any other site...
Critically – It's the one place you can get a enhancement or feature aired out. Sometimes they even get picked up. And, well, sometimes folks are a little too enthusiastic over ideas the rest of the community isn't enthusiastic about. But this is the only way to gauge the sentiment of the community.
As one of the folks who actually got -27. I expected this, and didn't actually care about the reputation hit. I felt a topic that needed discussing kept coming out in comments, and it actually ended up better than I expected. (On the whole, my reputation is positive from that question). And well, more than reputation – meta is the collective memory of the network. You don't always remember just the good things.
And sometimes even the unpopular views need airing and discussion.
In some situations, some announcements are unpopular or controversial and they get downvoted too.
Voting on MSE is based on sentiment. And well, meta is one of the hardest crowds to work with. It's the nature of our audience – folks who are enthusiastic about the network and its workings, and its topic matter.
I can think of a couple of factors off the top of my head why we get lots of voting here:
High regular voter/post ratio: We usually get around 5–10 on-topic questions here everyday, and often only one or two invoke reactions (maybe posts that liken downvoters to members of a mob? Hint, hint). It'd get a better statistician to prove this, but for what it's worth, it's only Monday and we already have several people who've voted more than ten times. My educated guess is there is more eyeballs here on the average post than most other places.
Lack of clear criteria for voting: Or "too many possible reasons for voting", if you prefer. I can upvote/downvote a post based on:
Easier invocation of reactions: Entangled with both the previous reasons, people can choose their stance far too easier on meta. A way bigger portion of questions here are like "Vim sucks" questions. You see posts with assumptions like that hit the Hot Network Questions, see lots of voting and commenting activity, and never seem inclined to drop off the list. The bar for downvoting is also low (and especially low these days), considering how often it has become to insult or accuse the audience of something.
Personally, I see far too many questions from folks who should have spent a week or two understanding the system better. People should be more skeptical of how good they think their common sense is, especially talking to an audience who's usually more familiar with the system, and consider why their brilliant idea hasn't already been implemented after more than a decade. That "die meta" post is a good read, even if it's outdated and doesn't touch on these issues adequately (in my opinion).
I think that the number of downvotes on this site reflects the large number of off-topic questions, and questions that users assess as being not useful for other reasons, which are posted here.
The tooltip for the downvote indicates that it should be used when posts are not useful.
