I’m very curious about the reasoning different people use when deciding to downvote a post or comment. Often, when something gets “heavily” downvoted, the OP will ask some variation of “why the downvotes?”. This is sometimes answered with sincere criticism, but sometimes is received even more poorly than the original offending post.
Do you downvote people who ask “why the downvotes?”? What informs the decision?
Mob mentality aka Circlejerk effect.
I think the more downvotes something has, the more it causes people to read it specifically looking for the reason people downvoted, which in turn makes them more likely to downvote it than if they encountered the same thing with no votes on it. It happens with upvotes too, and it makes vote distributions tend to swing out to the poles more than they would if votes were solely “on the merits”, so to speak.
Yeah I think it’s both. Some people just bandwagon because a handful of votes one way gives it legitimacy and they want to be part of something.