Proposal to solve the Uncommented Downvote problem

Question

I have seen the pattern many times and it always gives me a sad face. It goes like

The Problem

1. Peter puts up an answer
2. Anonymous downvotes Peter's answer, without commenting
3. Peter asks "@downvoter, can you please comment?"

If Anonymous comments and gives reason for his downvote, everyone knows he downvoted. Since downvotes have (unfortunately) some sort of negative emotion attached, Anonymous fears for his reputation within the community.

The solution

I think that the major reason people not comment on downvotes is because they will be known as "The downvoter". We can rid of this problem by showing the name of the downvoters. Being known already as the downvoter, the downvoter is much more likely and from what I can see even wants to give reason of why he downvoted.

Everyone is pleased to know the reason of a downvote, so this will do everyone a favor. But there might still be some people who are too afraid of this. In such a case, I think those people should pay the absence of their name being shown with reputation points. For people that make their name known as one of the downvoters, I think we should not or should take significantly less rep from them. So Anonymous has two alternatives:

Alternative 1:

1. Anonymous decides to downvote and to make his name public
   • He won't pay any rep, and will be urged to explain his comment
2. Peter will be pleased to know why he was downvoted.

Alternative 2:

1. Anonymous decides to downvote and not make his name public
   • He will pay a downvote fee (-2, -5 ?).
2. Peter won't be pleased, but Anonymous had to pay price for this.

Answer 1

There is no such thing as the 'uncommented downvote' problem. There is no problem with uncommented downvotes. There is no requirement to comment. There is no purpose in particularly encouraging commenting with votes. Crowd-sourcing means trusting the judgement of the crowd. The net vote ends up where it ends up, and the individual votes just aren't very important. The 'pity upvote' effect, in any case, has turned out to mean that the occasional downvote is the best rep thing that can happen to the average producer of mediocre content. No downvote- net vote 0, net rep 0. One downvote followed by pity upvote: net vote 0, net rep ...

To address some comments:

In the immortal words of Tom Lehrer: "The problem with folk music is that it's written by the people."

Voting is crowd sourcing. By definition, a crowd includes your crazy uncle Joel Earl and the professor from down the street. It works because, on the whole, it adds up to something sensible. Expecting individual votes to make sense is unrealistic. Expecting that every single downvote will come with an explanation is unrealistic. If you get an unexplained downvote, you shrug your shoulders and go on. If your post was a good one, someone else will wander along and upvote it. You Will Get Downvotes. If, contra Jeff's answer, the sites demanded an explanation, plenty of the explanations would be aligned with the 'tinfoil hat' crowd, and wouldn't make any difference to what you post. If you believe that many really good posts are languishing in negative numbers, go set an example and vote them up, and others will follow the example and vote for yours.

Answer 2

Editing out my prior frustration in favor of Shog's eloquent summary:

Oh, it's been debated. It's been debated on SO. It's been debated on the blog. It's been debated on UserVoice, and it's been debated on Meta. Some day, they're gonna break open a hidden tomb somewhere in Egypt and find hieroglyphics on the walls depicting down-voters wearing masks with frustrated chisel marks scrapped across them. It's done been debated!

The whole point of voting is that it is egalitarian and anonymous, just like in a democratic political election.

And just so you know, every downvote by a 2k or lower rep user is presented with this <div>:

(don't worry, no actual post scores were harmed in the making of this post.)

Answer 3

There is a problem with uncommented downvotes. Here's the problem.

This site is all about information. People ask questions, and other people disseminate information to answer those questions. Some answers are better than others. Especially with programming topics, the quality of the answers are often proportional to the experience of the person giving the answer. Some answers that are easy to understand without the benefit of experience are either incorrect or could be improved.

When a contributor downvotes an answer without explaining why, they are withholding information. If they know that an answer is wrong but don't explain how, then SO disseminates bad or incorrect information. It seems to me this goes directly counter to the purpose of SO: to be a one-stop-shop for quality information.

Downvotes should be explained. I propose the following solution:

Downvotes themselves are still accompanied by a reduction in rep. But all users should be prompted to explain the downvote. the explanation should be in the form of comments. Other users can then vote up these comments, and the downvoter can gain rep by these upvotes.