The actual spam and completely incoherent questions are deleted. So what you're left with is things that are actually legitimate questions, so don't merit admin

The actual spam and completely incoherent questions are deleted. So what you're left with is things that are actually legitimate questions, so don't merit admins intervening and deleting, but which touch a nerve in some other way; like people asking about how to send out large volumes of (presumably) unsolicited email, people asking homework questions, and the like. Also, note that some of these "most downvoted questions" are also among the most upvoted as well, having very large positive scores, like https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1642028/what-is-the-name-of-the-operator https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1642028/what-is-the-name.... Once a question becomes famous enough, there are likely to be a number of contrarians who don't like it and downvote it, and eventually that can add up. And then if you look in the comments of some of them, that seems to be not too bad but which have more downvotes than you'd expect, they got a downvote brigade because they complained about a few downvotes on meta. Pretty lame that people do that, but it happens.