How can I negotiate with this "angry" user?

Question

There was a user who's answer I unaccepted, who went and randomly downvoted one of my answers. I know that they were the one who did it, because:

• I can see the change to their rep
• One of the most-remembered users
• I left 2 reasonable comments, stating my reasons for unaccepting their answer, they didn't reply
• They were active

I unaccepted their answer because:

• The plot is unobtainable
• Part of the post was opinion-based
• I have figured it out myself

If these aren't good reasons to unaccept a answer, I don't know what is - but at the end of the day, this is not the point.

I want to find a way to tell this user that they shouldn't be downvoting me without any reason for that matter. How can I find a way to let this user in some way leave me alone?

Answer 1

I would say you are probably communicating how you feel to that user with this meta post. But whether that's a good idea is another matter.

Being so defensive about down-votes can't lead anywhere good. If you do have someone on this site who is intentionally unfair to you, they can only do so much damage. It is best to just move on, the positive rep you can gain far outweighs what you would lose if you are using this site right.

Note that the change to their rep isn't evidence that they specifically down-voted you, they may have down-voted something else. But again, even if it was, you are just hurting yourself by focusing on it.

Answer 2

It actually won't show other people a rep change when you downvote. If you really sat there and did math you could get extreme reason to believe at some point they downvoted, but you don't know when or if it was actually your post (please don't, you did get one downvote on your question and maybe it was him but who cares).

You also shouldn't negotiate votes, sure sometimes people leave votes you don't agree with. Sure sometimes those votes do make no sense. But as the other dude said it doesn't matter and you shouldn't even care. Unless that person is being overly toxic you don't really need to communicate with them (or for some other special cases such as someone repeatedly doing something they likely don't know is wrong which isn't too rare in editing). Even if someone is being overly toxic its probably best to just message a moderator or something of the sort and let them handle it. You shouldn't be "calling people out."

As an extra note it's completely fine to ask if people know why something is being downvoted, or to argue about whether something is "good or bad". This is however different than "negotiating the downvote". If you and another person want to argue about something (civilly) you can but this doesn't seem like it is that case.