# Is there any mathematical reason for which the question was downvoted?

Recently I was browsing through the questions of the site and this question caught my attention. To me it seemed to be very clear and an interesting question but for some unknown reason the question was downvoted (even though $1$ time). I am wondering whether there is really anything wrong mathematically in the post. Can someone enlighten me?

• There are 9 revisions all but one due to OP. I didn't look at it in detail, but this plus the comment thread suggest the question was not always all that clear. – quid Aug 3 '16 at 14:32
• @quid: But it is clear now. So, why the downvotes keep flooding in? It's very much puzzling (to me, at least). Incidentally, someone else has also downvoted without giving any proper reason. – S. Das Aug 3 '16 at 14:50
• The question got visibility via your post here as well as via an edit by the poster, so it is normal there are votes now. For a reason to downvote: somebody might object to OP having changed the question in a way that invalidated an answer. (This is not strictly a mathematical reason, but an etiquette reason.) – quid Aug 3 '16 at 15:11
• Does the current version seem "to be very clear and an interesting question"? On the whole having mathematical mistakes in Questions is not a bad thing, but rather often the reason for asking. Being unclear or uninteresting, on the other hand, are bad qualities for the site's mission to collect and curate excellent content. – hardmath Aug 3 '16 at 15:17
• @S.Das: Okay. Think of an interesting convergent sequence. Is it eventually constant? I would venture to guess that the convergence of an eventually constant sequence is not interesting to most of us. – hardmath Aug 3 '16 at 15:28
• @hardmath: I am not going to argue with you regarding the notion of "interestingness" of a question because that's a relative concept, I think. But if the question is downvoted only for being uninteresting, I would venture to say that many other questions should also be downvoted. – S. Das Aug 3 '16 at 15:33
• First, it is allowed to downvote posts for most any reason or no reason at all. (The main and for the most part the only actuall restriction is that one must not target a particular user.) Second, good practice and etiquette related to voting got discussed on meta often times; questioners changing their answered questions in a way that invalidates existing answers is rather not among the controversial reasons for dv. Third, mainly due to questioner's actions there is a question with answer posts that do not really answer it; this is not useful and questioner is mainly to blame for it. – quid Aug 3 '16 at 16:00
• @quid: Regarding the first point, does it mean that I can randomly downvote so long as it doesn't target a few selected user(s)? Really, that's silly. Regarding the second point,, I don't get what you wanted to say here. Do you really want to say that some action is not among the controversial reasons for dv implies that one can downvote? This makes no sense to me at least. – S. Das Aug 3 '16 at 17:00
• @S.Das : User A asked question 1. User B then answered question 1. Then user A edit the question to ask question 2 instead of 1, so it looks as if User B wrote a nonsense answer. Should we blame User B or A? – user99914 Aug 3 '16 at 17:21
• Also, now the question has only two downvotes. Saying that the downvotes are "flooding in" is just too exaggerate. – user99914 Aug 3 '16 at 18:13
• @S.Das Instead of criticizing quid for pointing out what has been consensus on maths.SE regarding downvotes (whether that pertains to "allowed" or "encouraged"), you could have read the posts in the down-votes tag which discuss this and more at length. There is plenty more to know about downvoting etiquette beyond what you learn from hovering over the button. – Lord_Farin Aug 3 '16 at 19:26
• @S.Das re 1, yes you could, in the sense that you would not get yourself banned from the site by doing this (except maybe if you make a point about doing it in a willfully disruptive spirit). This does not mean you should do this. re 2, the formulation was a bit clumsy. What I meant to say is that I believe this is a rather common reason for downvotes and not among those that cause a lot of controversy. It is among the more established reasons to downvote. re 3, by "this" I mean creating such a situation, or also "this question" in the sense of question-thread, rather than question-post. – quid Aug 3 '16 at 20:09
• In a completely localized view your point might have some merit, however in practice I feel it is reasonable to take the history of the situation into account. Further, to the general point: votes serve two main purposes, as signals of the quality of the content to readers, as feedback to the author. If an author's action are such that they should be dicouraged they might receive negative feedback in the form of downvotes. – quid Aug 3 '16 at 20:15
• @JoelReyesNoche: There was actually two downvotes. The first one probably was due to the vagueness of the question. But the second one was cast when the question was in final form (I know this because then I was writing this meta post). – S. Das Aug 4 '16 at 1:49
• @ArcticChar: Observe that User B answered this question even though he was not sure what the question actually meant. In this particular case, it is User B who is to blame because writing an answer without being clear what it actually means is clearly nonsense. – S. Das Aug 4 '16 at 9:39