Recently I came across a good question on Meta about whether users should downvote answers to bad questions. I looked into this idea because it has happened to me twice recently. I'm okay with that, because I realize that users are allowed to vote how they please, and perhaps these users saw something wrong with my answer that I didn't. I also know that some people believe I should have flagged or ignored these questions, but whether I should or should have answered is not my question here.

But then I noticed something else about the two questions that this happened on. In each case, the question and all answers have at least one downvote. Now, I can't guarantee they were all by the same user, but for one of the questions linked I had it open when I watched the question and both of its answers go from 0 to -1 within seconds of each other.

Is it likely that one user felt a question was so poor that every answer to that question was also worthy of a downvote? If a user did run through and downvote every answer to a question, is that considered serial downvoting? If it is, does the serial voting script that runs each day consider these cases?


No, this is not serial downvoting. Serial voting is when you go through and downvote (or upvote) a bunch of posts by the same author, regardless of their quality. You're voting for the person, not the content. Downvoting all of the answers for a single question would be casting votes on posts by different authors, so it wouldn't be considered serial voting, and shouldn't be noticed by the scripts that detect serial voting.

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    So what would be your take on voting on answers based on the question itself? I suppose that discussion goes back to the linked meta question, but I feel the argument could be made that serial voting as you define it has the same motive as those who downvoted all answers. "I'm going to upvote all this user's answers because I like this guy." vs "I'm going to downvote all these answers because this question shouldn't be here." – AdamMc331 Jan 30 '15 at 15:04
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    Just for the sake of completion: In the highly unlikely case that someone posts multiple answers to a question, then voting on those answers might trigger the script. This is what happened to me here (all answers I voted on were posted by Anna). – yannis Jan 30 '15 at 15:06
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    @McAdam331 You're still voting based on content that (subjectively) shouldn't have been posted. If you're targeting content, you're free to use your votes as you see fit. If you're targeting a person, regardless of content quality, then you run up against site rules. – Bill the Lizard Jan 30 '15 at 15:08
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    @Yannis Yes, that's true. I recently ran into a similar situation on the main SO site. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that serial upvoting had been detected/reversed there, since most of the answers are by one person. – Bill the Lizard Jan 30 '15 at 15:10
  • I understand where you're coming from, and that makes a little more sense. I continue to feel some gray area though, as downvoting all answers would be downvoting based on the content of the question, not the answer. However, (to play devil's advocate with myself) the result of that discussion on the linked question was that, while votes should be dependent of the answer's content, users are free to vote how they please, and as you said, did not go against site rules. – AdamMc331 Jan 30 '15 at 15:13
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    @McAdam331 "as downvoting all answers would be downvoting based on the content of the question". Not necessarily. The problem is that terrible questions also invite terrible answers. My go-to example is an opinion-based question. Chances are that it is going to get answers that are opinions and the chance that I'm going to find the opinions to be bad answers is quite high. – Louis Jan 30 '15 at 16:16
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    @McAdam331 Sometimes you answer a question because you notice all the other answers are wrong. You'd be justified downvoting them in that case (though you might be accused of tactical downvoting if you're unsubtle about it). – Jeffrey Bosboom Jan 31 '15 at 1:25

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