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I imagine there is a good answer on this site, but I am going to ask my question here anyway.

This question has been downvoted, but I am not sure why. It seems to me to be a fairly sensible query, but I am clearly missing something. (I just want to be sure that I doing the right thing, if I do get into downvoting.)

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    It is simple. Less research effort or unclear question. That should be the reason for a downvote. The question you linked is deleted now. I'm wondering why it was deleted.
    – Nog Shine
    Commented Jan 8, 2018 at 6:42
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    I don't agree that question deserved a down vote, but that's just my opinion. Seems like a perfectly fine question to me. Don't worry too much about down votes. They will always happen with usually no explanation :)
    – steelersquirrel
    Commented Jan 8, 2018 at 7:28
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    It's really just up to the users discretion and may be as simple as indicating "I don't like this post" or "I disagree." That said, hover your cursor over the down arrow and it states a lack of research, clarity and usefulness as criteria. Likewise, upvoting may be as simple as "I like this."
    – MmmHmm
    Commented Jan 8, 2018 at 16:27

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If you hover over the downvote arrow the base reasons are given

This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful.

The Main Meta has a canonical FAQ on voting.

Clearly someone thought it met one of those criteria.

The question had one downvote and was deleted by the OP before an answer could be provided.

enter image description here

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  • D Thanks for the link –– that's really useful/
    – Livrecache
    Commented Jan 8, 2018 at 23:15
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    "Shows no research", to be specific. I found and linked an explanation after a minute of googling. I was the downvoter
    – Gnemlock
    Commented Jan 11, 2018 at 7:00
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First of all, let's point out that it has only been downvoted by a single user (and was then deleted by the asker). As much as knowing why a question might have problems in order to understand how to improve it or engage the community about it is helpful, single votes are also not necessarily strong pointers to general community opinion.

That being said, we can still speculate why it might have been seen as problematic, keeping in mind however, that this is really just speculation. But when looking at the question

enter image description here

It might fall into a question category that has been discussed on meta before, namely "hey, I think I found a plot-hole!" types of questions along the lines of "Why doesn't Arnie need to reload his gun when shooting about 5 thousand thugs in a row?". These questions can be controversial (also depending on how they're asked).

I'm not saying it was necessarily posted with exactly this motivation and nothing precludes that question from actually having a reasonable and insightful explanation. But it might very well have looked like this kind of question to the single individual that downvoted it. Sometimes it comes down to the wording of your questions, too.

But this is all just speculation and the question is deleted already.

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