Looking at the most recent questions when I click the questions link I notice (at the time of this writing) 7/15 are down voted and 8/15 aren't. I'm not here every day to see if this is a trend but the times I have looked at questions it seems to be some sort of trend. So either a lot of people (probably myself most of the time) don't know how to ask questions, or don't really know what this site is for, or we have some overzealous people. If near 50% of the questions get down voted then can we just blame 50% of the people or change something about the site?
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3Not entirely sure what the issue is. Did you spot any downvoted questions that you think shouldn't have been downvoted? If so, then we do have something to discuss. If not, then the system works as expected.– yannis ModCommented Jul 31, 2014 at 13:58
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1The irony would be thick if I started getting downvoted lol. But, yeah the question is if 50% of posts want to ask questions that aren't deemed "valid" for the site, is the site really the site it thinks it is?– user441521Commented Jul 31, 2014 at 14:02
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1To clarify: We have a help center full of articles that explain in some detail what the site is about and what questions we welcome. We have tons of upvoted & open questions that people can look at and get a better understanding of our general expectations for questions. Yet, some people choose to ignore all that and just post their questions. That's not something we can fix.– yannis ModCommented Jul 31, 2014 at 14:03
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2@user441521 Meta downvotes aren't something to worry about, voting on Meta sometimes works a bit differently than on the main site: programmers.stackexchange.com/help/whats-meta– yannis ModCommented Jul 31, 2014 at 14:04
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2I think you're confusing the system's goals for something it's not. We aren't here to please >50% of the users who ask questions. If 100% of the users all asked a question that was a duplicate of an existing question, they would all get closed as duplicates, and the system would work as intended.– AmptCommented Jul 31, 2014 at 14:05
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I don't worry about downvotes at all. I use these sites to look for answers or ask question or give an answer or 2 myself. I don't worry about how popular I am or getting some kind of discount in something I guess?– user441521Commented Jul 31, 2014 at 14:06
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Like you said: either 1) people don't know how to post here; or 2) we're a bunch of asses. I firmly think it's #1 (though I'm a bit of an ass, actually). I think it's obvious that we do a poor job of explaining to users how to use this site. We need to display a red alert when a user is attempting to ask a question that has been closed 2000 times before!– MetaFightCommented Jul 31, 2014 at 14:15
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to start getting downvoted isn't irony, it's known as meta effect. FWIW, a wildly popular (score +1234) cross-site dupe of this question is: Why is Stack Overflow so negative of late?– gnatCommented Jul 31, 2014 at 14:46
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@MetaFight wrong, what we need is not read alert but “Magic 8-Ball”– gnatCommented Jul 31, 2014 at 14:48
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