Getting downvotes on personal ground

Question

I've got yet another downvote on my this, ancient, closed question. This question is around a half year old, closed, and has an extremely low view number.

I think I can suspect, the real reason to this downvote was this.

This downvote doesn't really embarrass me - if I post to meta, normally I get 10-20 downs here and further 1-2 downs on the main site. I accepted this long ago. Of course I could compensate this with sockpuppets or by taking part in a voting circle, but now I want to stay "legal".

So, what to do with this "legally"?

P.s. No, this post is not about a single downvote. This post is about the phenomenon.

Answer 1

Nothing really. If someone is targeting you with a pattern of downvotes, moderators get notified and can act upon this, but unless that detector triggers, there is nothing you (or anyone, including mods and even admins) can do. Also, the downvote might be completely coincidental or the result of someone who looked you up further, saw this question and honestly felt it needed a downvote.

Trying to game the system yourself with sock puppets or "voting circles" is a good method to get suspended, so please don't try it.

On a side note: You have really controversial views about a lot of things and voice those very vocal and sometimes agressively. It's an unfortunate but unavoidable fact that this can result in a backlash, with downvotes being a natural result on the SE network. If you are not prepared to handle this, the only advice I can give is to more often "silently disagree". Yes, this is not nice, but we are not some paradise were normal social behaviour is not valid.

Answer 2

Your complaint about being revenge downvoting sounds speculative. I have downvoted your question based on quality.

I have here a little bit uncommon system: its primary hard disk can't have an old, dos partition table, only an GPT type. It is an outer restriction, with what nothing can be done. It seems as if the firmware silently rejected the disk writes to a DOS partition table.

The premise of the question sounds bizarre, speculative, and implausible. The hardware somehow won't let you write certain bytes to a disk? Does that mean that if you were to do a byte-for-byte copy of a disk image using dd, FOG, or Clonezilla, that somehow something different would get written? Why do you blame the firmware? Who makes this weird motherboard, and what version of the firmware are you running?

If, indeed, the hardware behaves as unusually as you describe, please provide details!

I am thinking on the a windows2008 server install into that system. Is it somehow possible?

Have you tried it before asking us? Do you have reason to believe that it won't work? If it so, in what way does it fail?

Answer 3

In comments to the previous answers, you've indicated that you think that calling attention to yourself and your posts on meta should get you up/downvotes in a similar ratio as you get them normally.

This would be valid if the users spending time on meta had the same statistical composition as the users spending time on the main site. But this isn't the case. On the main site, you have a lot of "newbie" sysadmins and people who are new to the site. On meta, there are a lot of people who are experienced sysadmins and who have been on the site a long time and have strong opinions on what they want the site to look like, what a good question should look like and what questions belong on the site.

A new sysadmin might upvote a question or an answer that they like, without considering whether the question actually belongs on this site. A long-time user might downvote the same question or answer, for entirely non-personal reasons, because of their longer experience of the site. We've all seen the occasional wrong answer which still has been upvoted, by people who did not know or understand that the answer was wrong. (This does not mean any specific answer of yours; it's an explanation of how different people may judge an answer or a question differently.)

So, when you call attention to yourself by engaging in long debates and talking about how you feel persecuted by long-established members of the site, the people who will look at your posts are the ones more likely to be severe on bad questions. On the main site, you will also get people who won't bother to downvote a bad question because they don't really care about the quality of the site.

Of course, the meta users will also be the ones likely to spend the time to upvote a really good question of answer. As I've done to some of yours, while downvoting others.

Answer 4

Nothing.

There is nothing that can, or will be done about this downvote. If someone triggers the serial voting script, the votes will be reversed, and if you wish to flag a post of yours to have a moderator look into possible voting fraud, that's an option too... but getting a bad post downvoted once is not anything actionable... and now that you've brought attention to it on meta, you can probably expect more downvote(s) on it.

This is the nature of drawing attention to yourself and/or your posts. More eyeballs means more votes. For good contributions, those are upvotes, for bad ones, they're downvotes. This is largely by design and/or human nature, so it's not a situation where anything needs to be, or should be "done about it."

Personally, I'd recommend working on improving your contributions... you have a lot of heavily-downvoted posts that, frankly, deserve downvotes, but other than that, there's nothing to be done.