I’m not personally a great fan of the concept of down-votes, but I know people want to express a view and I understand they play a useful role. For me, the upvotes say enough and dreadful posts can be flagged for closure.
What I think is really unhelpful is when a question / answer receives down-votes with no feedback to the poster. Very few people intentionally post something unhelpful. What seems like a lousy post to an experienced user may not be so obvious to the novice. My personal mission is to try to get more people using Ubuntu and I think we risk putting people off by down-voting what they think is a reasonable question.
The tiny negative effect on your own reputation is not a deterrent to trigger-happy down-voting.
On the basis that everything we do in the site should make it better, would it be possible to mandate some kind of feedback to say why the post needs improvement when down-voting?
I don’t know if this is possible in SE, but I think it would be a very positive step. (I’m also interested in the irony of the number of down-votes my criticism of down-votes gets!!)
