Question: I just posted to our blog about our [Third Quarter Community Roadmap for 2020](https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/07/23/the-loop-our-community-roadmap-for-q3-2020/).

[![Q3 2020 Community Roadmap. For July: "Community at our Center": Training Launch and New Moderator Agreement. "Community Builders": Review Queue: Reviewer Suspend Experience. "Inclusion": Downvotes Research. For August: "Community at our Center": Moderator Quarterly Survey and Lavender Letter Follow Up. "Community Builders": SME Content Strategy. "Inclusion": Reactions Test Analysis. "Grow & Scale: Internationalization - Discovery and Election Automation - Discovery. "Connecting Users to Opportunity": Interaction Modeling/Engaged User Satisfaction. "General Improvements": New Editor. For September: "Community at our Center": Moderator Council: Governance. "Community Builders": SME Content Release. "Inclusion": Moderator D&I Training and New User Email Series v2. "Grow & Scale": Teachers' Lounge Moderation and Tools for Community Managers. "Connecting Users to Opportunity": Area 51: The Way Forward - Discovery. "General Improvements": GDPR Consent Management v2.](https://i.stack.imgur.com/jIMF1.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/jIMF1.png)

Please see the post for details on the projects that our Community and Public Platform teams aim to work on this quarter.

We are interested in your thoughts and questions regarding our upcoming projects and priorities on the roadmap.

Answer: 
The blog post implies that "Downvotes Research" is going to be limited to Stack Overflow here. I suspect you'll find very different results if you also start looking at the more subjective sites instead of just the technically oriented ones, and especially the sites which deal with more controversial topics (e.g. [IPS](https://interpersonal.stackexchange.com), [Politics](https://politics.stackexchange.com) or [any](https://judaism.stackexchange.com) [of](https://christianity.stackexchange.com) [the](https://islam.stackexchange.com) [religion](https://hinduism.stackexchange.com) [sites](https://buddhism.stackexchange.com)). And that's not even getting into the whole "[Voting is different on Meta](https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/whats-meta)" effect.

Also, will you be looking into how users feel after being downvoted, or are you just focusing on why users cast downvotes for now?
> 
> Downvotes research (July)
> 
> 
> Receiving downvotes on Stack Overflow can be a frustrating and
> confusing experience. We currently ask users to downvote posts that
> are not useful or are unclear, but this can be subjective and
> interpreted in different ways. We will run a short targeted onsite
> survey to better understand what motivates users to downvote a post
> and **use this data to inform inclusion and engagement opportunities.**
> 
> 
> 

Whom do you plan to inform here?

From *inclusion and engagement* part it reads like you want to engage and inform users that downvote posts.

If that is true, I think you are missing main point. Downvotes are for poor and unsuitable content, they are cast because users asking questions (or posting answers) are not following site guidelines.

If you eliminate users that will not follow guidelines no matter what, what remains are users that were not properly informed about guidelines before posting. This is huge pain point, especially on Stack Overflow. You need to improve informing about guidelines and informing about consequences before users start writing their first posts.