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An off-topic question recently appeared on the main site. It was heavily downvoted and got deleted after only a few minutes. But at one point before the question was deleted, I noticed it had been viewed just 3 times but had received 5 downvotes (screenshot below). I saw this view count in the feed, and also when I opened the question. How does something like this happen? Is it possible to downvote a question without increasing its view count?

I included the [bug] tag in case this is a glitch. But maybe there is a simple explanation for this behavior, in which case I am curious to know what it is.

enter image description here

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Using spam flags, a single user (with a single page view) can incure two downvotes to the post: one regular, and one automatic downvote from a spam flag.

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Given the time you posted this, it's most likely this spam question (only visible with 10k reputation); there's a copy over here in the records of a community project fighting spam across the network. That post has been automatically flagged with four accounts, and those flags carry an implicit downvote. IIRC, casting those flags (via the API) doesn't increase the view count of a question (though the system casting the flags did fetch the question details via the API, which counts as a view) but they do decrease the score. So that's a -4 to the score, and only a +1 to the views.

More details here: Can a machine be taught to flag spam automatically?

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