I asked a dumb question, now what do I do about it?

Question

A couple of days ago, I was wondering about an apparent redundancy in the closing words of General Hux's speech in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. What I should have done was sit on the question for a couple of days and figure out how to ask it, but I posted it right away as "Was General Hux's Speech Ad-libbed?" What I meant to ask (20/20 hindsight) was more along the lines of how rigorously he rehearsed his speech, but as it stands right now it's a pretty lame question, totally deserving of the downvotes it received.

So what should I do? Is there a way to admit, "OK, I asked a bad question, please don't downvote it any more than it already is"? Should I edit the question? Or should I just let it fade into the background?

Answer 1

If you think you can edit it into a good question, do that¹. Always do that. Otherwise:

Learn from your mistakes and let it be

There's really nothing else you can do:

• Asking people not to downvote is likely to have negligible effect; if anything it may encourage downvotes, because this is the Internet and sometimes people are horrible
• You can't delete the question, because it has an upvoted answer. Unless you can convince Valorum to delete his answer (or convince a moderator to delete the question, which seems even less likely), there's nothing else to be done about it

Eventually, people will stop caring about this question; it's already demonstrably true that older questions get less attention, and we can see that looking at the timeline for your question: it got 4 downvotes yesterday, but only 1 today; it may get a couple more votes today, because of the meta effect, but I suspect by the end of the week you'll stop hearing much from it. It also doesn't hurt that questions with a -5 score (which your question doesn't have, but isn't far from) are hidden from the front page.

Everybody makes mistakes. What matters is that you learn from them.

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¹ Just be careful not to radically change the context of the question, or modify it in such a way that existing answers are invalid. Both of those are frowned upon by the community

Answer 2

• You could edit it and hope that people notice and reverse their votes. (Don't get your hopes up too high though - a lot of people who vote on a question never come back to it after that. The more likely possibility would be to get enough upvotes to counter the downvotes it's already had.)

• Alternatively, you could just leave it. We've all asked bad questions at one point or another. Your question-asking history is good enough that you're not going to get question-blocked just because of this. Nobody will hold it against you.

There are also a few things you shouldn't do.

• Don't edit in a note to say "please don't downvote this any further". Such notices tend to act as downvote magnets in practice.
• Don't delete the question. You can't, because it has an upvoted answer.
• Don't edit it so as to completely change its meaning and invalidate the existing answer. If you want to ask something entirely different, post a new question instead.