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Four questions, all of which I think are high-quality, downvoted with no comment within the past hour.

Anyone want to own up to this? Or do we have a rogue voter who doesn't know that it's week?

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  • It's not me this time. I've learned my lesson :P
    – Andres F.
    May 5, 2012 at 12:30
  • You're just bitter because they dropped you back under 2k ;-)
    – Kevin
    May 5, 2012 at 13:49
  • Wait... it's video-games week? Shouldn't it be star-wars week?
    – Iszi
    May 5, 2012 at 14:46
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    I understand the frustration (believe me!) but I don't think people need to "own up" to downvotes; they're part of how SE works. As long as people aren't abusing the system with sockpuppets or other cheats, everyone gets 1 downvote or upvote per question to dole out as they see fit. We like people to explain them (and I explain mine), but we don't require it. Maybe they just don't like VG questions, in which case that's their prerogative, I guess.
    – Mark Beadles
    May 5, 2012 at 15:32
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    @MarkBeadles: No one's required to own up to it, but I'm hoping making a meta thread at least alerts them to the fact their votes are odd. (Also, serially downvoting a person or on-topic topic is considered abuse.) So far most of my video game questions had gotten zero upvotes, making continued video game questions a losing proposition for me. These were off the front page, so it's not like someone is just doing their daily voting. They're actively seeking out video game questions and downvoting them.
    – user1030
    May 5, 2012 at 17:13

3 Answers 3

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Unfortunately, since nobody is required to explain their down-vote and not everybody participates in Meta, you may never know why your questions were down-voted.

Aside from this week being video game week (although it really should be annual week - May the fourth be with you) there are two other Meta threads validating questions (that do not relate to gameplay) as on-topic:

Can I ask a question about video game based scifi/fantasy?

Which mediums can be the basis of questions?

Please feel free to continue asking your questions about the plots, characters, and backgrounds of video games. They are certainly welcome, provided they also conform to the other guidelines outlined in the FAQ.

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  • "They are certainly welcome" - Without this thread they were a net -6 rep (and another -2 from a question a few months ago). I get what you're saying, but I don't think that qualifies as "welcome".
    – user1030
    May 5, 2012 at 17:20
  • @JoeWreschnig What I'm saying is that unless the down-voter(s) decides to explain themselves - which they are neither required, nor likely to do - you will never really know why you were down-voted. However, the community has obviously decided (per the linked threads) that video-games threads are on-topic. So, they should not be getting down-voted simply because of the subject material. Anyone doing so is acting in direct contradiction of the community's expressed intent. Unfortunately here, there's nothing that can be done to control that except to counter the down-votes with ups.
    – Iszi
    May 5, 2012 at 17:52
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There are at this moment 50 questions tagged "video-games". Only 13 have been downvoted. 37 have no downvotes. That's about 25% of the questions have one or more downvotes. This sounds about average. Looking at the data, I don't think this is a case of serial downvoting of the topic. It may just be the luck of the draw, and it happened to come up while you were looking at it.

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  • 1
    More significantly, the question was about 4 questions that received downvotes - that's less than 10% of them. And despite the extra attention this has given those 4, none of them have answers yet...
    – Ward - Trying Codidact
    May 6, 2012 at 1:39
  • The first two questions in OP are not actually tagged "video-games". Should they be?
    – Raj
    Apr 1, 2019 at 17:02
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I am not sure if it's video game specific.

Did you post other questions this week or only video games? - and if so, were they downvoted as well?

I posted no VG questions (not my area of interest/expertise - I have the whole tag on "ignore") but I had many of my own questions - both new and some old - downvoted, on average 3-4 downvotes a day, with at least a couple of times being obviously serial (e.g. today I had 3 downvotes in the space of several minutes) - none of them with comments. Since I've been active on this site, I have had my share of downvotes, but the last 2 weeks the volume was materially higher (both in # of DVs as well as percentage since I post less than average).

As others noted, you can't really demand explanations - while the SE spirit is that you should not downvote without explanation, the letter - for good reason - is that the comments for downvoting never were and never will be required (having experienced revenge downvoting on SO myself, I can see why that's not a bad policy).

However, something REALLY egregious is usually caught in automated scripts (MSO has details) designed to remove serial voting (the algorithm is secret but clearly takes >4 votes since none of my serial-downvoters were reversed so far on SFF, unlike on SO where someone's serial downvoting of me to teh tune of 8+ votes was indeed automatically cancelled).

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  • Good point. I've noticed a few downvotes of my questions outside of the VG sphere, so maybe there's just been a spate of uncommented downvoting.
    – dlanod
    May 7, 2012 at 1:58

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