> I have interacted with a few new user recently who are very disgruntled due to getting a lot of down-votes on there questions... People downvotes for a wide variety of reasons and frankly a sane community has to have limits on what it accepts to *just keep going*: > The fastest way to kill any Q&A site, is to flood it with low-quality questions. And votes are the signals designated to make the system know that this is a low quality post and other users should just stay away from them. About new users, you have to be aware that we aren't downvoting *the user*, we are downvoting *the post*. As [deceze puts it][1]: > The main problem I see here is that downvotes are taken so damn personal. A downvote does not mean "you are a bad person and you should feel bad, go die in a corner". [...] > > What that user wants is the most useful article which is both not too specific to somebody else's code but fits their problem perfectly. *They do not want to sift through a ton of vague single-sentence questions with code walls to figure out whether that particular article fits their problem or not.* But that's what most downvoted questions are: they're either too specific or too vague or too long to comprehend or have some other criterium which makes them unsuitable to be a highly visible knowledge base article. > > That's what votes are for, to unclog the system from the regular stream of low-quality input that makes it less usable as a global reference. They are not there to insult anyone. If your question got downvoted, you should try to reevaluate it from the POV described above and improve it yourself. **Don't expect others to jump in and do it for you, that's simply unrealistic and impractical.** So, if someone downvote your post, take a step back and evaluate what were you doing wrong with the post that you can improve, or maybe try to explain [your problem to the duck][2] before asking us. He doesn't judge you. Oh, btw, I'm one that thinks that actually *we are not downvoting enough*. [1]: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/253230/792066 [2]: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/281270/what-does-rubber-duck-mean-in-debug-help