I suppose, given the context, I should say out loud that it wasn't me, both because I don't find it downvoteworthy and because I make a practice of not downvoting comments that reply to mine or that I reply to.

I endorse not trying to read much into one or two downvotes... the voting behavior of arbitrarily selected individuals in a group like this doesn't necessarily mean much.

The way to fix the formatting is to use a \ in front of the asterisk whenever you want to actually display it. This is also necessary for underscores, which some people use in their usernames.

I didn't downvote it, and don't have interesting speculation as to why it was downvoted.