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Encouraging people to explain down-votes

I suspect this is happening to me because I there are no comments under my answer.

I think users should only be allowed to down-vote if they leave a comment as to why.

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    People down-vote for all sorts of reasons and don't have to leave a comment. Also - do you have a specific example. But be warned - if you answer is wrong it will get more down-votes by bringing it to meta's attention.
    – ChrisF Mod
    Commented Jul 15, 2011 at 10:49
  • Why do you suspect this is happening? Why do you suspect that instead of the more logical theory that they just don't like your answer? As I've said dozens of times, downvotes are anonymous for a reason. And they're going to stay that way.
    – Cody Gray
    Commented Jul 15, 2011 at 11:00
  • Well, I think it 'might' have happened to me once, but it already had been voted up. happening is maybe a strong term. Commented Jul 15, 2011 at 11:57
  • There are no older -2 downvotes shown in stackoverflow.com/users/560383/tomwrong?tab=reputation , so maybe someone just took back their upvote in that case you remember.
    – sth
    Commented Jul 15, 2011 at 13:51
  • Note that there is such a thing as "tactical downvoting", e.g. voting competing answers down temporarily in order to get more visibility for an answer, then removing the downvote within the limited window where that's possible. This is antisocial behavior that's frowned on, but not that common.
    – McCannot
    Commented Jul 15, 2011 at 14:12
  • You might be interested in this thread which presents some actual statistics on competitive voting from the SO database. Commented Jul 24, 2012 at 12:10

1 Answer 1

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I could only find one answer of yours with a downvote, and that answer is a joke answer that isn't really useful. This is most probably also the reason it got downvoted, and why it will continue to be downvoted further.

There is no reason to assume this downvote comes from a "competitor", and I couldn't find any other downvotes on your answers.

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    Nice find. Added my -1, but didn't leave a comment.
    – Cody Gray
    Commented Jul 15, 2011 at 11:01
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    @tomwrong - see, I told you to be careful about bringing this up.
    – ChrisF Mod
    Commented Jul 15, 2011 at 11:34
  • Looks like I've got a lot to learn ChrisF. I've only started to use stackoverflow to vent otherwise boring pub conversation. Commented Jul 15, 2011 at 12:57

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