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I have always wondered, do SO/SE employee "super diamond moderators" or admins, or whatever word there is for them, have an ability to see who downvoted them?

For example, I can see my own downvoted questions on my reputation tab. Does this interface look like it does to me, or to everyone else, when logged in as an admin?

And if it's not built-in to the interface, do those who are developers ever look it up in the DB? If not, why are you lying? (that's a joke.)

I ask this because I think anonymous downvotes save us from taking the downvote personally. Even at our best, sometimes it's human nature if we know the source of criticism, and I don't want anyone to take a downvote that I make personally.

And no, I'm not making any assumptions or guesses as to why one might do this, beyond that desire that so many have to know why they were downvoted . Simply wondering if it exists.

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Even if they do have access, I'd like to think the admins are a bit more grown-up than to care. –  Blowski May 11 '11 at 0:05
@Blowski, sometimes, not caring is not about being grown-up. There are practical reasons that knowing would be helpful, mostly based around figuring out what you did wrong. –  NickC May 11 '11 at 0:08
Just seems from the way you wrote the question that you were suggesting that they might use it pettily. If I misread it, I apologise. –  Blowski May 11 '11 at 0:11
Sorry if this question was distasteful - I added my motivation for asking to the question. –  NickC May 11 '11 at 1:35
To be honest, anyone with as many rep as yourself shouldn't even be worrying about rep, I know I don't. –  Chopper3 Aug 14 '11 at 20:49

2 Answers 2

up vote 33 down vote accepted

There is a show votes option for developers, but we explicitly disallow it on our own posts -- to reduce any temptation of looking at votes on our own posts.

The intent of the function is to look at voting irregularities at the developer level.

And of course developers have access to the underlying database anyhow, if they really must know.

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Nice info, thanks - it's good to know that even though you have tools to do your job, you're still mindful of this. –  NickC May 12 '11 at 5:33
I wonder how often developer "bob" asks developer "tim" to open up his post and click the show votes option... :) –  Adam Rackis Jan 24 '12 at 18:55
@Arjan: that particular option isn't necessarily available to community managers either (some of us have dev access, others don't). We all have (readonly) database access if we need it, but having to go write queries to get it tends to reduce the temptation to use it for personal reasons considerably. –  Shogging through the snow Mar 17 '13 at 18:52
(Noted & thanks, @Shog9.) –  Arjan Mar 17 '13 at 19:18

No, there is no way in the interface for us to see who down voted us in the interface. Yes we have access to the raw data (obviously, it's in the db) but ... really there are much much much more interesting things for us to do with our time.

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I upvoted...*maybe*. :) –  Neil Fein May 11 '11 at 1:57
Zypher's right on this one, yes we (developers, not mods) can see this, but we really, really don't care, it doesn't matter and there's always much more interesting things going on all the time. We want to know how to make page X faster, and then when we're done, how to make it twice as fast as that...who voted on who we don't care about unless there's a bug or sock puppets we're investigating. –  Nick Craver May 11 '11 at 2:10

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