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I'd asked What is a special verdict form, and what is the basis in law for this jury to be able to develop their own theory and not have to disclose it?

There are several helpful and thoughtful comments. There are no close votes, but two down votes appeared quickly.

Below them I wrote:

'll bet there can actually be an informative and authoritative and well-received answer post to this question - but I'm tired of the answers in comments and down votes, so the community will now be deprived of the answer post because I'm deleting the question.

Down votes have several real effects. They often come from folks who don't really bother to generate many question posts (a Stack Exchange size is essentially a null set (as opposed to an empty set) without questions! cf. uhoh's lemmas) so they don't have the same awareness of the full spectrum of their impact that someone who asks questions would.

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    What leads you to believe that Law.SE downvoters often have those characteristics?
    – Pat W. Mod
    Commented Jun 2 at 0:43
  • @PatW. After asking thousands of SE questions over many disparate SE sites and reading several tens of thousands comments under them (especially those with the "-1 because" or "I downvoted because") I start to see patterns emerge. Clicking on the user ID's, I usually see high rep yet the number of question posts is zero or could be counted on one hand. We can't know for sure, there are no metrics, but I'd bet a cup of coffee that if SE had a silent, drive-by down-vote characterization and aggregation utility, we'd see that most were from folks with little experience with generating questions.
    – uhoh
    Commented Jun 2 at 0:51
  • @PatW. for example, you've got a whopping six questions in the main site total, the last one in 2015. Just to address your curiosity, I would put you in the "not so familiar with what it's like to ask a question here" category. That may mean nothing to you, perhaps you feel it shouldn't matter. That's OK. I'm just letting you know my thought process to address "What leads you to believe..." and show you what kind of things I've looked at over the years.
    – uhoh
    Commented Jun 2 at 1:04

1 Answer 1

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Unexplained and arguably unfair down votes (or up votes) are part of the system

It’s a good question. I don’t know why it was down voted or by whom - they had their reasons and whether those reasons were thoughtful and considered is immaterial- if you have the voting privilege it is every sense your privilege in that how you use it is entirely up to you.

However, I will venture a suggestion - the defendant in that trial is an individual about which a lot of people hold very deep opinions and emotions. As I said, I think it’s a good question, it’s not actually about the particular case but uses the case to ask a general question, I don’t think it is in any way partisan but there will be people who see the name and vote on that alone. That’s their privilege.

It’s unreasonable for you to expect that all your posts will be met with universal acclaim. Particularly when the question might stir strong emotions. People find it difficult to be fair and impartial when strong emotions are engaged - that’s not a character flaw, that’s just part and parcel of being people.

Answers in comments are not allowed

Flag them and we’ll delete them.

I’ve undeleted the question

Once you posted the question, you gave SE a licence To use it, and we don’t allow self-vandalism of useful content.

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  • Thanks for your thoughtful answer! I'm not sure I ever expressed any expectations that "all" my my posts would be met with "universal acclaim" - that would be contrary to years experience. I hadn't heard of the concept of "self-vandalism" before, but ya; point well taken. It is true that we can vote however we want for whatever reasons we want, period. And at ~9 Q/day there's no basis for an argument that people are driven away by excessive down-voting. I don't feel driven-away for example.
    – uhoh
    Commented Jun 3 at 2:10
  • Still, I would like to explore further why a community feels tha sometimes quickly down-voting on-topic questions that go on to generate good, well-received answers is the best way to go. Perhaps that's more sociology than "Stack Exchange theory" and so unanswerable. We've made some progress by changing the reputation increment for question posts from +5 to +10 per vote to match that of answers posts, but I still feel - across the whole network - there's still a significant fraction of the voting community that doesn't appreciate the raison d'etre of questions, which is to facilitate answers
    – uhoh
    Commented Jun 3 at 2:16
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    @uhoh it is a sociology question but an easily answered one - haters gunna hate.
    – Dale M Mod
    Commented Jun 3 at 10:32
  • Rather than haters being "Born This Way", James Taylor's "You've got to be carefully taught" comes to mind.
    – uhoh
    Commented Jun 3 at 21:49

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