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I have several questions related to song lyrics:

All have received a mix of upvotes and downvotes. The downvoters offered no explanation whatsoever for why they downvoted. I'm slightly baffled as to why, because they seem like reasonable questions to me. It would've been better if the downvotes themselves would've explained, but I am curious: why might people have downvoted these? Is there actually a problem with the quality of these questions? If so, how can they be improved?

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    I'll be interested to see if you get any answers, I almost posted a comment on your 'Nighttime Birds' question to ask why it was downvoted.
    – Spagirl
    Sep 14, 2017 at 13:27
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    I suspect there may be someone who simply thinks song-lyrics should be off-topic and downvotes all such questions on principle (same for story-identification), but of course I can't prove anything.
    – Rand al'Thor Mod
    Sep 14, 2017 at 20:58
  • @Randal'Thor I suspected the same thing - I was hoping that that wasn't the case, though, especially given that the current community consensus is that those questions are on topic - it seems like a bad reason to downvote.
    – EJoshuaS - Stand with Ukraine
    Sep 14, 2017 at 22:29
  • @yannis I completely disagree. "Toxic" seems like a significant exaggeration at best, especially given that the people who actually downvoted didn't bother to give an explanation themselves. IMHO, that's the actual toxic behavior here, especially for a site that's still in Beta and is still building consensus around what constitutes a "reasonable" question on the site.
    – EJoshuaS - Stand with Ukraine
    Sep 16, 2017 at 15:06
  • @yannis I disagree - people should only downvote for valid reasons. The only valid reason to downvote is that the question doesn't meet the quality standards set by the community, not the fact that you happen to dislike the question by whatever arbitrary criteria you set. The tooltip for downvotes says "this question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful." There's no room for "I happen to dislike this question because it doesn't meet my personal standards."
    – EJoshuaS - Stand with Ukraine
    Sep 16, 2017 at 16:37
  • @yannis My point isn't that my definition is better than yours, it's that the community's definition is what we should go by when downvoting. I can't let my personal opinion trump a community consensus to the contrary.
    – EJoshuaS - Stand with Ukraine
    Sep 16, 2017 at 18:38
  • @yannis Not sure why you're calling me out specifically when at least three other people, including a site mod, have posted "why was this downvoted" questions on meta and I haven't (in fact I tend to be against such questions for much the same reason as you).
    – Rand al'Thor Mod
    Sep 19, 2017 at 11:36

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