I asked two valid legit writing-related questions and they got sufficient downvotes to prevent me from asking any more questions.
Is this place usually so maliciously hostile?
Hope someone is capable of an honest accurate response.
With all the reputation hoops and voting restrictions here, I think the votes must be genuine. But I can't see what etiquette my question breached. Was it something as minuscule as using an apparently wrong "tag?"
English Language & Usage attracts many different types of participants, including hundreds of regular and semi-regular contributors who have accumulated enough reputation to be entitled to upvote or downvote answers. In my experience, it is impossible to know why a particular voter chose to upvote or downvote a particular question or answer. On a more general level, though, questions and answers that suffer from certain common shortcomings tend to receive poor marks at this site. The reason for this negative reception isn't that downvoters view newcomers' questions as so many unwelcome billy goats tramping across their bridge—although to a person unfamiliar with the site's standards, it might seem that way.
Assuming that you are Finn3gansMate, you have asked two questions on the main site: Is there some sort of database on the net for jargon of the different centuries? and "... inspired by burglary intent." Is "burglary intent" grammatically correct? As I write this, the first question has attracted 40 views and received 2 downvotes, and the second question has attracted 81 views and received 5 downvotes (some of which may have occurred in the past 14 hours, after you posted this Meta question asking whether English Language & Usage is full of downvoting trolls).
The body of your first question looks like this:
Any relevant websites would be much appreciated.
and the body of the second looks like this:
If not, I would love to hear some alternatives. It does not sound right.
These blocks of text provide practically no useful context for the questions you ask. Consequently, anyone interested in responding to either question must guess at what you are looking for—in the first case because you don't explain what you mean by jargon, and in the second because you don't provide a full sentence (or paragraph) containing the phrase that you ask about.
Besides their lack of context and the absence of any evidence of research on your part (two serious shortcomings at this site), your questions have particular drawbacks that undoubtedly contributed to the poor reception they received. In the case of the "database on the net for jargon of the different centuries" question, the problem is (as Chenmunka points out in a comment beneath the question) that you are making a request for resources—in effect, you are asking, "Where can I find X?" There is nothing inherently wrong with asking such questions, but they are off topic on EL&U's main site. To compensate for that policy, the site maintains an extensive list of resources as a page of EL&U Meta under the title What good reference works on English are available?
Regrettably, although that page includes a section on "Historical Resources," it doesn't include a list of resources dedicated to jargon through the centuries. I hope to add information on various reference works dedicated to slang published between 1665 and the present in three major categories: British slang, U.S. slang, and British regionalisms—but I'm not sure whether these would be of any use to you because I'm not sure what sort of jargon you are interested in.
Your "burglary intent" question verges on being so specific that it may be of no interest to future site visitors. One measure of a question's perceived value at this site is whether it has some likelihood of being useful to people other than the person who posted it. A student struggling to compose a particular sentence or paragraph in an essay for English class might very well benefit from having participants at this site proofread the passage—but no one else has any reason to look at that question or to care about the answer to it. For that reason, such questions are off topic here.
Your question about whether "burglary intent" is grammatically correct is framed as a simple yes/no question—though I gather that you are also interested in suggestions of alternative phrases that might convey the same meaning. But the term "burglary intent" is not at all common. A Google Books search returns eleven pages of matches for that wording, but the vast majority of them do not involve "burglary intent" as a set phrase. In fact, only two matches from the search results seem truly on point. From "California Official Reports: Review Granted Opinions Pamphlet," part 2 (2002) [combined snippets; quoted language not shown in snippet window]:
If he formed the requisite burglary intent while in the kitchen he is not guilty of burglary because he did not have that intent when he entered the kitchen. However, if with the requisite burglary intent formed in the kitchen he enters rooms other than the kitchen he is guilty of a separate burglary offense for each other room he enters, and if he returns to the kitchen with that intent he is then guilty of ...
And from Lisa Storm, Criminal Law By Storm:
Burglary Intent
Depending on the jurisdiction, the criminal intent element required for burglary it typically the general intent or knowingly to commit the criminal act, with the specific intent or purposely to commit a felony, a crime, or a felony, grand, or petty theft once inside the burglarized area. The Model Penal Code describes the criminal intent element as "purpose to commit a crime therein" (Model Penal Code 22.1(1)).
Example of a Case Lacking Burglary Intent
But even though the Google Books evidence for the phrase is exceedingly slight, if you had framed your question as something like "What is the normal wording used for the legal concept termed "burglary intent" in Lisa Storm's Criminal Law by Storm?" I (although probably not everyone at this site) would have considered the question legitimate and of possible interest to future site visitors.
Anyone coming to a new site for information or assistance needs to review the site's policies regarding how to ask questions that the site deems useful and on topic. Failing to do so puts the person's questions at risk of being downvoted as off topic or irrelevant to the site's mission and interests. I am truly sorry that you didn't obtain the answers you were hoping for when you posted your two questions at this site; but I hope you can see that part of the reason why things didn't work out well is that the questions you posted didn't meet the site's standards for appropriately expressed, on-topic questions.
In short, No.
But this deserves some explanation.
English actually should properly be called Advanced English. Because of the nature of the site there are rules to follow for a correct question. Not complying will create your situation.
Some pointers:
https://english.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic
How much research is needed?
Maybe our sister site https://ell.stackexchange.com will suit you better though.
I hope you will find the motivation to pass this difficulty. We run on questions!
The shortcomings of OP's original question notwithstanding, this site is plagued by anonymous downvotes, with no explanation given and no explanation other than pure malice possible.
