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The question What determines if the handle of a pan gets hot while in use?, seems to have picked up a lot of anonymous negative feedback, completely out of proportion to the actual score.

For those unfamiliar with the feature, unregistered and low-rep users can leave anonymous feedback, which doesn't count as a vote, but is visible as summary statistics to members with > 10k reputation (and moderators, obviously). Typically, anonymous feedback only really starts to collect on posts once they're more than 6 months old.

Without quoting actual numbers - suffice it to say that it's very rare to see such a large discrepancy between votes and anon feedback.

I can't see anything obviously wrong with the question. Does anyone else have any ideas as to why anonymous users (e.g. Google hits) are finding this page unhelpful?

If so, what can we do to improve it?

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    Also worth noting that the view-count is fairly low - ~300 views in 7 months. So it's not like folks are just sleeting in from Google. I rather suspect the title might seem a bit misleading given the specificity of the question (even though the top answer does a pretty good job of answering the title question).
    – Shog9 Mod
    Commented Oct 8, 2011 at 17:25
  • How do I see that? I'm not finding it. Possibly having a senior moment...
    – yossarian Mod
    Commented Oct 8, 2011 at 21:10
  • @yossarian: Check the 10k tools, not mod tools.
    – Aaronut Mod
    Commented Oct 8, 2011 at 21:13

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I'm the author of the accepted answer on that question and I have to say that I struggled to write it...the physics is moderately complicated which makes it hard to give a satisfying answer that is accessible to the layman.

I've just popped over to Physics.SE (where I am a moderator) to poke around the anon/low-rep feed back tools, and this seems to be a pattern: questions which (1) can be stated by the layman (2) are interesting and (3) have an answer that starts "Well, it complicated..." get a modest but positive number of votes and somewhat negative feedback.

It may just be the nature of the beast.

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