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Down votes have caused me to reconsider thoughts and sometimes even change my mind altogether. I am not as smart as I imagine.

• enraged_camel 14y ago
  It has never done that for me. While I see the number of points my posts get, I don't see why. Often times I suspect that people downvote me because they disagree, and not because I'm factually wrong.
  • xaa 14y ago
    Agree. And not just for my own posts. I see downvoted posts like parent's and think that it's no worse than several other comments on this page that aren't downvoted. Another example is the ubiquitous person who posts on some story complaining about the CSS or that the font of the page is bad design. That person never seems to get downvoted despite being flagrantly off-topic. The only constant seems to be that comments spouting very popular truisms ("patents are bad", "functional languages are good") garner lots of upvotes.
  • andrewflnr 14y ago
    More often, downvotes make me wonder if I could have phrased my thoughts better so as not to tick people off. For all my pessimism, I'm curiously optimistic about people's willingness to accept my views if I can just work the arrogance out. It's hard to know either way, but I think taking it as an incentive to improve is a good way to handle it.