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That's fine until you have to ask a question that isn't answered anywhere on the internet. Then you post a perfectly reasonable question and get it downvoted to hell...

https://stackoverflow.com/q/79461875/265521

That's just the latest one I've asked. Here are some more examples:

Case insensitive string comparison is "opinion based": https://stackoverflow.com/q/11635/265521

How to catch Ctrl-C "needs more focus" (this was closed but has since been reopened): https://stackoverflow.com/q/1641182/265521

This reasonable question had 13 downvotes by power-mods but has climbed back to positive when discovered by actual users: https://stackoverflow.com/q/41015509/265521

Another example of idiotic downvotes. This started off at -3: https://stackoverflow.com/q/79050597/265521

It's a common pattern that questions get a lot of downvotes initially from people trawling new questions who see a lot of genuinely bad questions (seriously there are loads), then see a good question that they can't understand in 1 second so they just downvote/close it too. So you quickly get downvotes and then later you get people coming from Google who are actually looking for that thing that upvote it.

I think SO actually did try to improve matters once. I can't find it now but they were going to make it impossible to go below 0 votes and allow one free "reopen", or something like that. But the power mods absolutely hated that idea and SO sort of depends on them so they chickened out. Now they're paying the price.




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