How to pragmatically deal with down-votes on a good question when you are the author of the questions?

Question

Recently someone down-voted a question I posted on Ask Ubuntu which was a very good question. I do not give a damn but is it alright to sit and see the down-vote on a good question or is there a way in Ask Ubuntu, to pragmatically deal with it? There could be a flag available to users to report a down-vote perhaps. Thank you. :)

Answer 1

Voting is the central moderation mechanism of Ask Ubuntu. Ideally, the score of a post should signal to visitors whether a post is likely to be useful or not. We even get a tooltip on hover telling us what sort of reasons one might have for clicking the up and down vote buttons. Folks can vote for other reasons too, and, ok, sometimes those reasons are bad. It might be the case that the downvote on your post was accidental (it's easy to misclick on a small touch screen, for example) or was cast for some nefarious reason. Or, maybe, someone just didn't think your post was useful. It's hard to view your own work with a high degree of objectivity - I may feel my post (or what I cooked for lunch today) is really great, but other people may feel differently about it. Sometimes people leave comments about issues with a post, and using their or your own insights you can edit it to make it better, sometimes not.

Usually there's no way to tell that a downvote you received was ill-motivated, but sometimes there are signs that the voting system is being abused. If you're getting downvotes on many posts and you suspect someone is targeting you, we can definitely look into that. You can use a flag for moderator attention in that case. But we can't do anything about the odd downvote here and there - that's just par for the course here and complaining about it usually doesn't garner all that much sympathy.

If you can't think of any way to improve your post by editing it, you might consider offering a bounty. That can sometimes improve the community perception of a question, especially when it requires relatively a lot of work to answer.