I recently posted a question that received excessive down votes in addition to being closed.
Are practices of such kind discouraged? Is it necessary that so many different users should express the same reaction, despite the question also being closed anyway?
Many people, including myself, try to encourage others to vote up or down according to particular criteria for various reasons. Ultimately though, the culture on Stack Exchange tends to leave the matter to the voter's discretion, unless votes are targeted at a particular user, which is considered abuse.
One reason for downvoting that newcomers are unlikely to be aware of is to encourage deletion of the post. Closed questions are deleted automatically after a certain period, if their score is zero or less. Users with more than 10k reputation may vote to delete any closed question after 3 days since the closure, and users with more than 20k may vote to delete a question with a score of -3 or less immediately. Even open questions are automatically deleted after a while if they are unanswered and have a negative score (or eventually if they have a zero score if they have low views and less than 2 comments). These features help clear away content that is not useful.
On this basis, I encourage people to downvote even questions that are already closed or already have a negative score, if downvoting is warranted.
But I do observe that voting tends to pile on... we see both downvotes and upvotes accummulating. I wonder at times if we feel so much pressure to cast votes, because voting is encouraged, that we vote in agreement rather than on making an independent judgement, because the latter is harder work...
By the way, I am not sure your particular question warrants downvoting. I am not sure what you are really seeking. I think voters perceived your question as a kind of feature request to Canonical, or alternatively as a prompt for a discussion. Neither belong on this site - feature requests should be made on Launchpad, and discussion is ill suited to our format or scope - our goal is to produce a high quality reference library. However, taking your question at face value, it does not seem to me a bad question, nor does it seem opinion based, because experts on Ubuntu will be able to answer it on the basis of fact. Perhaps there is some edit you can make to your question to make it clearer that you are requesting expert explanation, if that is indeed what you hope to receive.
Are practices of such kind discouraged?
That's a tough one. As @Zanna said your question wasn't bad. It's just possible that some users saw it as not being a great fit for this site. As @Zanna mentioned, downvotes on questions are important to "help along the Roomba."
But for reasonable questions like yours, that are closed as off-topic, I personally would never downvote if the score was already -2 or lower. I do see this as "piling on", and discouraging to the OP (you, in this case, of course).
That said, sometimes when there's a -2 score, one or two more users will come along and do a (presumably) "sympathy upvote" that can return the score to Roomba-ineligible status.
However, it seems to me that the "Stack Exchange" auto-ban algorithms also likely take into account the number of downvotes on questions. You certainly won't be temp-banned for a single "bad question", but having other downvoted questions combined with this "highly downvoted" question could trigger a ban faster than having just several "slightly downvoted" questions. This is all complete theory on my part, as we don't know how the actual algorithms are implemented (intentionally so).
For this reason, I would only "pile-on" on a really bad question where corrective behavior for the user may be warranted if they repeat the behavior consistently.
In addition to the reasons that @Zanna mentions about people seeing your question as a "feature request" to Canonical, there's also the possibility that some users saw a lot of bold text in your question and voted because they perceive that as shouting, similar to ALL CAPS.
I personally do not like a lot of bold text in a post. It seems unnecessary to me, and jarring, and it does look a lot like Internet shouting, even though I know you didn't mean it that way. I didn't see or vote on your question prior to seeing this Meta question, but if I saw a question that I felt was off-topic, and it had excessive bold, that would usually garner a downvote from me.
I would propose a light emphasis is typically more appropriate for posts, and I've made that edit your post.
As for whether it is "Opinion-based", I respect @Zanna's views a lot, but I would still consider this one as being (just slightly) "too subjective" to fit here at first glance. I don't arrive at this view on the basis that "Only Canonical can answer it." However, it seems to me that answers to it must inherently discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the various methods, and it feels like answers would far too easily devolve into the type of "Discussion Answers" that we try to avoid here.
But while I wouldn't personally vote-to-reopen, I definitely wouldn't "pile on" downvotes here either ;-).
Voting is important. It is an essential element of how our site is moderated. Useful questions get voted up. Questions that are not useful get voted down.
Those with the vote down privilege are supposed to vote down when a question is not useful or appropriate for our site. Questions that are off-topic like the one you asked are considered not useful and therefore it is a responsibility of community moderators to vote it down.
Users are not able to vote multiple times. You received multiple down votes because multiple users determined that your question was off-topic or otherwise not useful.
In addition to all of this, your question was likely perceived by most downvoters as a complaint or a "rant in disguise". In my experience, users are much less forgiving of someone who makes a post just to rant.
If you find yourself in a situation where you've realized that you've made post to a SE site where the community is clearly not in agreement that your post is appropriate, then you have the ability to "stop the bleeding" by self deleting your own post. This action will prevent any new votes from being cast. Calling more attention to it may just subject you to even more down votes.
I'd like to chime in to this discussion because it seems that downvoting of questions increase. Over the years, I've been monitoring and answering questions in this forum and detect more and more downvotes. Often on "first" questions, where the OP might get not have the gist to ask it correctly. Personally, I find downvoting very distracting if the OP tries to ask something (except they're ranting). I would like the idea that the down voter has to argue why he did so. It's easy to click a button, more difficult to justify it. And the OP could learn and understand how to ask better questions.
