Downvoting is for poorly-researched questions. It ...

# random

[tenwit]

Downvoting is for poorly-researched questions. It is not for extreme cases. The tooltip over the down arrow is very clear
"The question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful"
It is not exceptional or rude. Downvoting means "please improve the question so that future readers can learn from it and its answers".
When the question is improved, downvotes should be removed or even replaced with upvotes.
And the number of previous downvotes is unimportant: if you see an unclear question that shows no research effort, downvote it. No matter how many votes it already has.
The rules are well explained on mso and in the docs.