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What do you do? Is it natural to be upset when you ask a question in the spirit of learning and people vote you down?

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It may or may not be natural*, but it's counterproductive to get upset. Chances are, there's something wrong with your question that caused it to get downvoted. Review what you've written, and improve it. Not only will that increase the chance for an upvote (for what little that's worth), but you'll get better answers.

Downvotes are not a rogue attack on you, or a personal judgement. They're actual policy, recently reinforced, meant to increase the quality of questions.

You might get an unwarranted downvote, every now and then. Honestly, I very rarely see that. If you get just one downvote, and there's nothing that could be improved, just shrug it off. Alternatively, if you get more than one downvote, chances are really high that your question is lacking in one way or another.

Most of the time, downvotes are accompanied with explanatory comments. If you've been downvoted and you don't know why, post a link here, and we might be able to help improve it, or improve future questions.

*More of a psychologyoverflow.com question.

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  • It's good to hear from a level headed person who didn't downvote everything a said. Thanks.
    – John
    Commented Oct 10, 2010 at 18:27
  • "They're" -> "There"? I don't think downvoting is a recently introduced policy
    – Yi Jiang
    Commented Oct 11, 2010 at 9:27
  • @YiJiang: Recently reinforced, not introduced. And "they're" is what it should have been - your grammar correction is incorrect. :P
    – Aarobot
    Commented Oct 11, 2010 at 13:28
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What I do? first I try to find out what is wrong and correct it.

I only get (a bit) upset if there is no comment explaining why the answer or question was downvoted. It's hard to improve without having any hint what is wrong, as I try to answer or ask the best I can.

But reputation is not that important and unwarranted downvotes don't hurt that much, they are often accompanied by an upvote.

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[From Personal Experience]

I once wrote a one line answer to a post, which was downvoted twice and upvoted once. SO it had the score of -1. The answer was to the point, but did not carry any explanation. It also carried a comment asking for explanation. I researched a bit, and added a explanation to the question with figures and quickly it garnered 4 upvotes and a score of 3.

So add reason to your answers.

Give them some details.

Include a link or two(if needed).

Include a pic or two(if needed).

and generally try to answer the question like you would want someone else to when they answer your question.

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