# What causes one to lose reputation from a question

About a month ago, I posted a question on MSE. It got 3 upvotes and no downvotes, but today I lost 4 reputation for that question. The question is linked below:

Proof by showing equivalence of derivatives

• You currently have two downvotes on that question. – Mike Miller Jan 7 at 2:56
• When you lose an even quantity of rep on a question, and it's not due to the removal of a user, it is likely due to downvotes received. Since you seem clearly to know (because you linked it), the post from which you lost rep, did you click on the link to your answer? Did you note that in fact, at the time of this posting, your answer displayed a net score of $1$? Hence, explaining the $2 \times -2$ rep, i.e. the reason for the lose of four rep points? Each downvote on an answer deducts 2 rep points from the answerers total. – amWhy Jan 7 at 17:35

You lost a total of $$4$$ reputation because each downvote costs you $$-2$$ rep (there were two), and the times at which they were cast can be viewed in your profile. A place showing more details about your post can be found in this timeline.

However, you have asked a good question so I don't understand those downvotes. For your interest, here is a meta post concerning proof-verification questions.

• There is an upvoted comment on the question, from semele who seems to have misunderstood how the proof works. So my guess is that two people downvoted because of thinking the proof was wrong. (I've added an answer saying why it isn't!) This was a question that I'd already favourited, BTW. – timtfj Jan 9 at 4:30
• That should read from someone. I've got too many autogarble languages turned on in SwiftKey and it guessed in the wrong one. – timtfj Jan 9 at 4:48