From the other replies I’m assuming you got down-voted to −1 before getting back to 0.
My personal response:
No you aren’t doing something completely wrong.
Asking for feedback in a situation like that is fine—it is not obvious what the initial down vote was for and knowing may have been interesting/informative.
Asking for feedback about a small number of down votes in a heated argument can be annoying as I don’t expect it to get an interesting response.
The later down vote may have been by the initial person, who did not want to explain their initial down vote, or may have been by someone who generally dislikes requests for explanations of down votes. But I would just accept not knowing for sure unless they decide to answer.
You are right; I completely expect that my posts in debates, or on controversial topics are going to be downvoted by people who disagree with me. It happens a lot because a) My opinions are different than many LWers and b) I’m new to all this “rationality” stuff, so I don’t always make as much sense as I wish I did. Sometimes I’m just plain wrong.… That’s alright, and in those cases I generally expect other people to eventually upvote (if I’m not plain wrong) and it all evens out on it’s own.
But when someone asks your opinion on a book and you give it (both the asking and the giving being done in a polite and informative manner) it seems bizarre (and honestly rather rude) that someone would just downvote all of your posts in the conversation without giving a reason.
Note: I sorta wish you could click on the karma and see who upvoted and who downvoted. Not just for situations like this, but (as I mentioned elsewhere) there’s a big difference between a post with 20 each up and down votes, and a post with no votes whatsoever, even though they both ended up at 0.
On the halfbakery website (not exactly a web forum, but similar in some ways) you can’t see names of voters, but you can see the positive and negative vote numbers separately, as well as an icon summarising the overall balance.
From the other replies I’m assuming you got down-voted to −1 before getting back to 0. My personal response:
No you aren’t doing something completely wrong.
Asking for feedback in a situation like that is fine—it is not obvious what the initial down vote was for and knowing may have been interesting/informative.
Asking for feedback about a small number of down votes in a heated argument can be annoying as I don’t expect it to get an interesting response.
The later down vote may have been by the initial person, who did not want to explain their initial down vote, or may have been by someone who generally dislikes requests for explanations of down votes. But I would just accept not knowing for sure unless they decide to answer.
You are right; I completely expect that my posts in debates, or on controversial topics are going to be downvoted by people who disagree with me. It happens a lot because a) My opinions are different than many LWers and b) I’m new to all this “rationality” stuff, so I don’t always make as much sense as I wish I did. Sometimes I’m just plain wrong.… That’s alright, and in those cases I generally expect other people to eventually upvote (if I’m not plain wrong) and it all evens out on it’s own.
But when someone asks your opinion on a book and you give it (both the asking and the giving being done in a polite and informative manner) it seems bizarre (and honestly rather rude) that someone would just downvote all of your posts in the conversation without giving a reason.
Note: I sorta wish you could click on the karma and see who upvoted and who downvoted. Not just for situations like this, but (as I mentioned elsewhere) there’s a big difference between a post with 20 each up and down votes, and a post with no votes whatsoever, even though they both ended up at 0.
On the halfbakery website (not exactly a web forum, but similar in some ways) you can’t see names of voters, but you can see the positive and negative vote numbers separately, as well as an icon summarising the overall balance.