@gparyani By all means ping us whenever you need anything. Even if you just want to chat. ;)

@gparyani that is not possible. Neither users nor mods can do that. Research is not possible without data and that data is not provided.

Do people really downvote other answers to let their own posts shine more? I often tend to upvote 'competing' answers if I think they are good!

@Bernhard There used to be (and apparently still is) a lot of discussion about this sort of "tactical voting". Here's a bunch of related questions on meta: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/tactical-downvoting