How is a topic voted down?

I think that all you can really tell is that one more person has marked it down than has marked it up

you start at 1

1 marks it up - it goes to 2
1 marks it down - it goes to 1
1 marks it down - it goes to 0
and on and on

so it could mean any number of positive and negative thumbs - with one more negative than positive

It's not salacious enough, Rap.

Apparently somebody doesn't want a travesty of Louisiana justice discussed.

Thumbing down doesn't necessarily mean negative re the person who posted the thread - people may just not be interested in the subject and are "cleaning the new posts page". There are many subjects that only interest me a little bit or not at all, and I figure it's the same for other people. Some of us like to clear out the ones we don't intend to read. In my case, I almost always thumb down puzzle threads or trivia threads.. though not always.

Maybe it's fallout from something you said on another thread, maybe
you pissed somebody off.
Incidentally I think the sentence that guy got was a disgrace, even the
lesser sentence their talking about, 15 years was it?, would be a disgrace
as well.
Crazy world.

It's not that they don't want it discussed, as everyone else will see the thread on their New Posts page. It's just that the person(s) who thumbed it down won't see it.

It could simply mean one person isn't interested.

I think many of us "tidy up" our pages to reflect our personal preferences.

I can't see it listed unless I search, and now it has a positive rating--weird.

Check your filter options near the top of New Posts. You can toggle between "Filter Noise" and "All Topics". You may be filtering out your own topics.

That makes sense. I never have "filter noise" selected.

Me neither, but I noticed that it somehow defaults to that occasionally. I posted a question about it over on the Groups thread but that thread seems to be dead now.

You got to have pornstars and Charlie Sheen and the thread will skyrocket.