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I ran into a user that has a swath of poorly thought out, poorly written, not relevant, and often just plain wrong answers (it appears this person has a very limited understanding of information security and chooses to answer many advanced questions). I went through all of their answers and gave a downvote on every one that fits into these categories (about 3/4 of their answers).

I came back several hours later to find all of my -1 for downovotes turned into +1 (in my achievements feed), and my votes appear now to have never been cast.

What is the reason for this?

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If the person's posts were deleted, then you would be credited for the +1's for the votes that no longer exists.

It's not that they were turned into upvotes...

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  • Thank you, title adjusted. – cremefraiche Mar 2 '16 at 5:27
  • Interesting, the answers do not appear to be deleted..? – cremefraiche Mar 2 '16 at 5:29
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    if not deleted, then there might be a flag for "revenge downvoting" that someone reversed your votes, but I cannot confirm - let me check – schroeder♦ Mar 2 '16 at 5:31
  • I'd expect that if that's a thing. I didn't bother looking at their other answers until they so enthusiastically defended an answer(since deleted), and later comment(since deleted), that had the effect of saying 1+1=3. If that's the case, I'd like to point out that I only downvoted their poor quality answers. – cremefraiche Mar 2 '16 at 5:38
  • I don't see a flag like that in recent history. Perhaps another mod may chime in later on. – schroeder♦ Mar 2 '16 at 5:45
  • Almost all of my downvotes are accompanied by a comment explanation, but in this case I gave none (in a hurry and a lot of poor answers). I imagine I could avoid getting my downvotes pulled when they are given in large numbers if I took the time to explain why I felt the answers were low quality? – cremefraiche Mar 2 '16 at 5:49
  • "revenge downvoting" is triggered when a single user downvotes a single other user a lot. Mods might not investigate each comment. I'm not saying that's what happened, but it's a potential explanation. – schroeder♦ Mar 2 '16 at 5:51
  • @Schroeder it is not only a potential explanation, but extremely likely due to recent evidence :D – AviD♦ Mar 2 '16 at 8:35
  • @cremefraiche I reviewed that user's answers. Some of them were okay, many were not great, very few were so bad that would require not just a downvote, but a followup review. Definitely not the majority. I am curious what you're referring to? – AviD♦ Mar 2 '16 at 9:07
  • @AviD Not one of this person's 23 answers provides any supporting information to their answers. They are often extremely short, opinionated, inaccurate, and appear to have little to no effort invested in their creation. This person shoots from the hip every single time. After reviewing their answers again, I feel I should have downvoted more than the 16 I did. Is this really the content we are going for here? – cremefraiche Mar 2 '16 at 10:06
  • @AviD I was in the process of drafting a comment in the link you gave to schroeder when the question was deleted. I would like to point out that I only deleted my comments after the other user did, and firmly stand by my downvotes not being in retaliation. I downvote every single answer I see on this site that I believe to lessen it's quality. In this case I chose to view this persons profile after they stood by their ignorance on a topic(even when given clear evidence to the contrary). I then viewed all of their answers and voted accordingly. – cremefraiche Mar 2 '16 at 10:19
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    @cremefraiche You're on a slippery slope here. Even though your intention is to keep the site clean, you're still targeting a specific user. Downvote the bad posts when you encounter them, leave a comment pointing out what's wrong, or flag if necessary. After that, have faith that we can handle the situation as a community. Just don't go over their answers looking for things to downvote. – S.L. Barth Mar 2 '16 at 12:26
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    @cremefraiche I appreciate your concern for quality, but you'd still be focusing on the bad posts by a single user. The script that detects serial downvoting doesn't know or care if the posts were bad. If you believe such posts are not downvoted (fast) enough by the community, then maybe that is a good follow-up question: what to do about a user who consistently posts bad content. (I'm assuming here that your judgement of these posts is right. I don't know who the user is, nor do I want to know). – S.L. Barth Mar 2 '16 at 21:12
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    @cremefraiche "Downvoting bad posts when you encouter them" means that, if you're reading a question you were going to read anyway and you see a bad answer, you should downvote that. What you were doing was deliberately seeking out encouters with the bad posts. – David Richerby Mar 2 '16 at 23:06

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