I have interacted with a few new user recently who are very disgruntled due to getting a lot of down-votes on there questions...
People downvotes for a wide variety of reasons and frankly a sane community has to have limits on what it accepts to just keep going:
The fastest way to kill any Q&A site, is to flood it with low-quality questions.
And votes are the signals designated to make the system know that this is a low quality post and other users should just stay away from them. About new users, you have to be aware that we aren't downvoting the user, we are downvoting the post. As deceze puts it:
The main problem I see here is that downvotes are taken so damn personal. A downvote does not mean "you are a bad person and you should feel bad, go die in a corner". [...]
What that user wants is the most useful article which is both not too specific to somebody else's code but fits their problem perfectly. They do not want to sift through a ton of vague single-sentence questions with code walls to figure out whether that particular article fits their problem or not. But that's what most downvoted questions are: they're either too specific or too vague or too long to comprehend or have some other criterium which makes them unsuitable to be a highly visible knowledge base article.
That's what votes are for, to unclog the system from the regular stream of low-quality input that makes it less usable as a global reference. They are not there to insult anyone. If your question got downvoted, you should try to reevaluate it from the POV described above and improve it yourself. Don't expect others to jump in and do it for you, that's simply unrealistic and impractical.
So, if someone downvote your post, take a step back and evaluate what were you doing wrong with the post that you can improve, or maybe try to explain your problem to the duck before asking us. He doesn't judge you.
Oh, btw, I'm one that thinks that actually we are not downvoting enough.
