What is voting down?
Voting down, also known as "casting downvotes", is how the community indicates which questions and answers are least useful.
When should I vote down?
Downvotes should be used to indicate issues with quality, effort, or accuracy of a post:
- Downvote questions that don't show any research effort or don't contain enough information to be clear and answerable. These questions may also need to be closed.
- Downvote answers that are incorrect or don't provide sufficient information to be useful in answering the question. Some answers may not attempt to answer the question at all, and should be flagged.
You have a limited number of votes per day, and answer downvotes cost you a tiny bit of reputation on top of that; use them wisely.
How do I vote down?
Click the large down arrows to the left of each post.
You can undo your votes by clicking the same vote button, but only within a small time limit, so be careful with those clicks. To change a vote from down to up, click the up arrow without undoing the downvote, and vice versa.
What happens when I vote down?
When you vote down, you are nudging that content "down" the page, so it will be seen by fewer people. Voting down answers is not something we want you to take lightly, so it is not free.
- Downvotes remove 2 reputation from the post owner.
- Downvotes on answers remove 1 reputation from you, the voter.
- Downvotes on questions are free. (Why?)
- You can vote 30 times per UTC day. You get an additional 10 votes on questions only. (Why?)
What are the alternatives to downvoting?
The upvote privilege comes first because that's what you should focus on: pushing great content to the top. Downvoting is not meant as a substitute for communication and editing.
Instead of or in addition to voting down:
- If the post is spam or offensive, flag it.
- If the question is a duplicate or off-topic, flag it so that users with the close privilege can vote to close it.
- If something is wrong, please leave a comment or edit the post to correct it.