My assumption is that disagreement is one of several reasons that people downvote, and that people are more likely to volunteer explanations (especially to new users) for the other reasons than for disagreement. Therefore, I assumed that the downvotes I got with no explanation were for disagreement. The one person who provided an alternate theory of why I was getting downvoted denied being one of the downvoters, and when I took his advice and clarified something from an earlier post, the new comment was also downvoted.
When I said I had observed a spoiler being stated “numerous” times in the thread, as evidence that the spoiler policy wasn’t preventing this effectively, someone replied asking for a list of links to specific comments; I replied with nine, and that post was downvoted three times.
My assumption is that disagreement is one of several reasons that people downvote, and that people are more likely to volunteer explanations (especially to new users) for the other reasons than for disagreement. Therefore, I assumed that the downvotes I got with no explanation were for disagreement. The one person who provided an alternate theory of why I was getting downvoted denied being one of the downvoters, and when I took his advice and clarified something from an earlier post, the new comment was also downvoted.
When I said I had observed a spoiler being stated “numerous” times in the thread, as evidence that the spoiler policy wasn’t preventing this effectively, someone replied asking for a list of links to specific comments; I replied with nine, and that post was downvoted three times.
I agree with this
I suppose this is possible, but I doubt the size of the effect is significant.