After my last META post it appears my posts are being targeted.

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1) What does this community think and what is to be done if this is the case?

2) May a mod/the relevant person investigate and give feedback?

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    If there's truly one person (or multiple) targeting you, then either the SE system will reverse it or there will be nothing you or we can do about it. In the meantime, complaining about it and/or acting like we're all out to get you won't help (and perhaps may give whoever is downvoting you more reason to do so, however misguided that may be). – El'endia Starman Jan 16 '16 at 6:49
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    I'm sorry, but "unresolved" is different than "the community disagrees with me". – David Stratton Jan 16 '16 at 13:09
  • Does this answer your question? A user just voted to close five of my questions. Who should I contact? – Jim G. Aug 5 at 8:34

There is not a problem here.

  • This is not the result of one person's votes, it is at least a couple. One person cannot vote on the same post more than once.

  • 7 downvotes across 3 days and 3 posts is not evidence of abuse.

  • You do not—and cannot—know who votes on your post. If you think you can guess you are wrong in two ways. First, it is almost always different than people think because quite frequently the people that comment with criticism are not the voters and votes often happen independently of comments. Second, it is not productive to try to guess. Just stop it, that isn't helping you or anybody.

  • You've raised quite a lot of noise on meta linking back to these posts. Drawing attention to problematic posts is almost guaranteed to bring more down-votes. People have expressed in comments and on meta why they think the posts are not as useful as you think they were, so it should not come as any surprise that others also vote on them in disagreement with your analysis.

  • Both now and in the past you've requested feedback on your posts. People have spent lots of time writing detailed analysis of them and explaining what could be improved. You have, historically, almost always argued with them rather than working to address the issues. We get it. You disagree and think your posts are more useful than other people find them to be. A lot of this probably has to do with writing style—they may make sense in your head but your train of thought is difficult for others to follow. Given how resistant you've been to being helped on this issue before, it comes as no surprise that you'd get such a high percentage of unexplained downvotes.

  • You refer to the other meta post as "unresolved", but it looks pretty resolved to me. The posts in question have been improved based on the feedback surrounding them and the community direction is pretty clear. The only outstanding aspect seems to be that you continue to disagree with the way this site functions overall.

My suggestions? Slow down, take a deep breath and take a step back. Spend some time trying to understand other people's perspective and how you could learn from the past feedback you've gotten. Realize that truth questions are never going to be on topic and moderation does not happen based on the "truth" value of posts. Rather than fighting it, find other venues to deal with the kinds of things that are out of scope for this site. Come here for the things that are well suited to the format; figure out what this site is and play off of it's strong points.

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I personally don't believe that anyone is targetting your posts. I'm someone who votes frequently on this site (total votes since joining - 2,826 upvotes & 193 downvotes) and am very happy to upvote well-sourced and well-argued post even if they represent a viewpoint I disagree with. From the stats it is apparant that I am not a heavy downvoter, but I do occasionally down vote (what are in my opinion) poorly-argued posts even if I agree with their overall perspective. From my observations of voting patterns at least a majority of regular voting users behave in a similar way, with perhaps the average voter being slightly more inclined to downvote more often than I do.

I've been happy to upvote many of your posts in the past and imagine that all things being equal I will be doing so again in the future. However...

I sometimes find myself viewing one of your posts and find that your material does not quite meet the standard I would expect. This tends to happen more for questions that do not specifically call for a Catholic viewpoint and far far less for questions that do. I don't often downvote in these circumstances, but when I see a few downvotes from others, I can certainly appreciate the reasons why. The main problem I notice in these particular instances is that you seem to put forward a dogmatic view as either the only possibility or the only reasonable possibility without giving due consideration to other possible viewpoints*. Such an approach does not normally cause problems on Catholic scoped questions, but on questions where non-Catholic perspectives are on-topic it is a significant weakness that in my opinion can lead to attracting downvotes. It's not that you are merely advancing your viewpoint exclusively, it's that you often do not fairly or reasonably address alternative viewpoints.

I found supporting evidence for my opinion when I reviewed your 10 most recent answers and found that in the 7 explicitly scoped to Catholicism questions, you attracted 0 downvotes. In the other 3 questions, only the one you took to Meta attracted downvotes.**

*This particular answer seems to be a good example of what I was talking about previously - when I first viewed your post, I believe I saw revision three & it may have already attracted it's down-votes by that stage - if not I observed that they were made soon afterwards. When I saw them I could appreciate the rationale for those down votes even though ultimately I decided not to vote that way myself - I merely abstained from upvoting. One thing that has influenced my behaviour in this regard (refraining from down-voting on your posts) is that you are often responsive to comments and make frequent revisions to your posts - so I feel it's sometimes better to wait to see the finished product before making a judgment. I didn't feel strongly enough about my reservations to post a comment.

My conclusion is that if there is any targetting against you, it has not been particularly evident in the last week or so.

**In defense of using this methodology rather than responding to the particular downvotes you've listed above, I put it to you that the lion's share of votes cast by the more active users on the site are made on new posts. If someone really was targetting you and downvoting old posts, you should expect to see many more than the downvotes you've referred to.

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Maybe, but the SE engine is pretty good at identifying it and reversing it. With the most recent down votes, perhaps there is something going on, but the other posts have received multiple down votes, so that certainly can't be from a single person.

If it gets worse I'm sure the SE engine will catch it by then, and then reverse it.

It happened to me and the system did catch it and stop it, so there's proof that it works.

More downvotes today: I think I am the victim of some serial downvoting

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