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I am well aware that there are endless topics regarding hostile downvoting and how it should be dealt with. I have read a bunch of these threads, but one thing I have never seen raised is persistent downvoting of certain topics, seemingly unrelated to question quality or uniqueness.

While I personally try not to stress about the odd downvote, I do feel I have noticed patterns in questions pertaining to certain topics getting downvoted. I wonder if it is my imagination, but I am not convinced it is. I can see why some people might have a financial interest in limiting the spread of certain niche information. Or it could just be that people who know about certain topics are especially irritable and impatient.

My understanding is that SE has algorithms to detect hostile mass-voting against individuals. Does such a mechanism exist for topics (and if not, should it?)

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  • Re "one thing I have never seen raised is persistent downvoting of certain topics": I think there was a complaint on MSO a few months ago. It may have been for the Go language tag. Commented Oct 24, 2022 at 11:35
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    It was: Why do I always get downvotes on Go questions?. And it apparently goes way back. Commented Oct 24, 2022 at 11:37
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    Re "people who know about certain topics are especially irritable and impatient": More likely due to seeing the same beginner questions over and over and over again. They don't realise they should find the canonical duplicate (can be nontrivial to do), vote to close, and move on. Or take a break of, say, two weeks (too engaged). Commented Oct 24, 2022 at 11:49

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Well practically - the 'system' isn't content aware.

are SE algorithms designed to catch it?

As such, no - there's no magic algorithms that catch voting on a specific topic. That said, unless a site's super high volume like Stack Overflow (and sometimes even there - since folks often focus on a specific language or field), people are going to notice if say, all the questions on left handed carpentry are downvoted. If there's an obvious human noticeable pattern, likely someone's going to let a mod know. While we can't see voting, community managers can. If you do notice something like that flag a post, and give as much information as you can on the flag.

It's also worth consider (even if it's heavily a MSE issue) some 'valid' topics may be controversial and 'organic' downvotes tend to be valid even if there's a certain degree of 'voting against the topic, rather than the post'.

This is also occasionally true when there's no 'topical' pattern but someone's say randomly voting on stuff for a badge.

While I personally try not to stress about the odd downvote, I do feel I have noticed patterns in questions pertaining to certain topics getting downvoted.

This can be a thing, but in general if a post has value overall, a single downvote's going to get drowned out by upvotes

I can see why some people might have a financial interest in limiting the spread of certain niche information.

One person's 'niche information' can be another person's pet peeve. Or well it could be general crankery. I don't think people generally downvote out of 'financial interests'

Or it could just be that people who know about certain topics are especially irritable and impatient.

Well - a lot of technical folks... tend to be?

So practically it 'could' be a problem but unless there's organised, noticeable downvoting the effects ought to be limited

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    That all makes sense to me. Commented Oct 24, 2022 at 3:24
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    The only addition I'd make here is that it has been necessary for us to inspect content-targeted voting in the past, so some manual tools exist to aid with analysis. At the moment, however, we do not receive a high volume of inquiries into content-based serial voting. (As always, if you see something weird you think might be harmful to a site, let us know -- moderators have access to CM escalations; and everyone has access to the Contact Us form.) Commented Oct 24, 2022 at 5:53
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    Well generally our visibility as mods here tends to be what we get from the community team once y'all have investigated. And if there's something spicy going on on my sites I want to know first :D Commented Oct 24, 2022 at 10:59
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Every site is different, and has their own pet peeves.

Here are a few examples:

  • Physics.SE
    Most people don't like:

    • "Do my homework"-type physics questions

    • Non-mainstream physics, including pitches for personal theories. We deal with mainstream physics here.

    • Questions about fictional physics

  • Space.SE
    Life-threatening experiments:

    • Building a rocket engine to launch myself or some other cargo into orbit

    • Developing/storing a fuel for my rocket

    • Any other type of life-threatening amateur work in or around space exploration (i.e., sending yourself to the moon or Mars)

  • Stack Overflow - Kali Linux

To help deal with these problems, along with the help files and per-site-metas posts, we have the , , and all-caps warnings that popup if you attempt to use a cautionary tag:

Enter image description here

Other than the above, catching posts about topics that tend to attract negative attention is done manually; by people who monitor the new questions tab and user-moderate their site.

Blocking certain tags is a strong hint, the pop-up warning is another; we'll always have to rely on users to have the final say, unless we want to run into some of the problems caused by the catching too many posts.

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  • Re "fictional physics": Do you mean questions like this? Commented Oct 25, 2022 at 5:55
  • No, they don't care about other sites; ask this on their meta. Commented Oct 25, 2022 at 7:52

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