Answer 1

Stephan Manthey, downvotes occasionally do get abused. It's perfectly fine, even recommended, to contact a moderator when you see that happening!

In SoloLearn's content creation guidelines, you can find the principles that guide downvoting. We aren't supposed to randomly downvote everything we don't like - it's meant for stuff that definitely doesn't work, like spammy questions, wrong answers, bad behaviour and that sort of stuff.

On the other hand, when you got like eight upvotes and one downvote, it's probably not worth the trouble, even if it looks dubious.

Answer 2

I have observed in other online places, that visibility of downvotes led to a lot of arguing.

People tend to feel personally attacked and retort. Other people emphasize and take sides. Quickly, things go south.

Anonymous downvotes are probably more likely just seen as:

'Whoops, someone strongly disapproves of what I wrote.'

If you are forced to comment, even if the downvote itself remains anonymous, the poster will see the relation and feel even more attacked. Again, useless arguing will follow suit.

I have no scientific data about these things obviously, but I'm also not making it up, I watched those tendencies a lot here over the last 1.5 years or so.

Answer 3

The point of downvoting is to do it anonymously. Only platinum moderators can see who downvoted, and see whether downvoting had a reason or not.

Answer 4

Maybe off topic, but worse thing than downvote is when someone leaves comment on your code like this:
😂
just a crying smiling face :D, happened to me once, someone was laughing at my code. It was some simple code, I was just learning basic syntax, but you know it's not pleasant to see that someone thinks your code is a joke, still didn't downvote.

Answer 5

voja, 😂 as a comment under a code that is no joke is just plain dumb and probably says more about the person than about your code.

Downvoting code... I rarely see a usecase for that, unless it's stolen or something like that. Still, it's done a lot, right? What's the purpose?