Why is SE Meta so downvotish? [closed]

Question

I see many questions on Meta SE that are very interesting to me but many long-time users are so quick to down vote. Why can't Meta SE be more inviting to new members and give real solutions to improve a question, rather then a quick down vote with no explanation? Why not let other novice Meta users have a chance to answer before down voting a question out of existence?

For example these questions:

• Don't bump "dead" questions
• Why do some comment replies using the @username convention fail to work?
• Site Recommendation: Q&A for campers, RVs, camper vans and any Home on Wheels
• Are questions asking about a standard way of doing things automatically an opinion based question?

and many others made by new users are relevant but a duplicate, but good questions with good answers, but the hoard down votes... discourages most new users from ever returning.

Answer 1

You make lots of bad and wrong assumptions here, and that is the reason I downvoted this specific discussion.

This is what you claim, or at least what is implied for me:

"Long time users downvote all the questions, even the good ones"

And that is simply not correct. On many aspects.

Answer 2

many long-time users are so quick to downvote

How are you quantifying "long-time user"? (As I noted in a comment, your Meta.SE account is over four years old.) How are you quantifying "so quick to downvote"? How long, for example, do you think a user should have to deliberate for before deciding whether to downvote a question or not? With all due respect, you have no way of knowing how many downvotes on a question were cast by "long-time users", or how "quick" those users may have been to hit the downvote button.

Why can't Meta SE be more inviting to new members and give real solutions to improve a question, rather then a quick downvote with no explanation?

Downvotes work differently on Meta sites. Here, they can simply be used to express disagreement with the premise of a question, rather than to signal that the question needs improvement. The downvotes to this question, for example, likely indicate disagreement with your assertions that users here are "too quick" to downvote questions, or that "most new users" are driven away by downvotes.

Why not let other novice Meta users have a chance to answer before downvoting a question out of existence?

Downvoting a question doesn't prevent people from answering it. Questions do get hidden from the Home tab if they reach a certain score threshold, but a) they're still visible in the Questions tab, and b) that threshold is lower on Meta sites.

I won't deny that high-rep users probably post the majority of answers on Meta.SE, but that's because high-rep users tend to be a) more active here, and therefore more likely to see a particular question, and b) more knowledgeable about Stack Exchange's inner workings, and therefore more capable of answering questions about them (which is what Meta.SE is for).

the [horde of] down votes discourages most new users from ever returning

Again, with all due respect, I think it's too early to make that judgement call in those specific cases, given that those questions were all posted within the last four days. The OP of the first one responded to its answer only an hour ago, and only the OP of the last one has shown any signs of being discouraged as far as I can tell.

I'd also like to note that, even if those users never post to Meta.SE again, that may not necessarily mean they were "chased away" by the downvotes they received on those questions. They may simply have no further questions that need asking. It's not uncommon for users to post to a particular SE site, get the answer they were looking for, then never post there again, not because they don't want to, but because they don't need to.

Answer 3

First let's review the criteria for downvoting on the downvote tooltip so we're all on the same page...

This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful

In addition this being a meta site, feature-request questions can be voted on as polls.

And now let's take a look at the questions you reference.

• Don't bump "dead" questions

That's closed as a duplicate. The question asker didn't reference the duplicate at all so the evidence is they did not show any research effort. It's also a feature-request question so maybe the downvoters simply disagree that this is a good idea, the answer explaining why it isn't certainly has plenty of upvotes to evidence that hypothesis.

• Why do some comment replies using the @username convention fail to work?

Basically the same thing. A duplicate with no research effort i.e. evidence of looking at other questions here on this meta for the answer.

• Site Recommendation: Q&A for campers, RVs, camper vans and any Home on Wheels

Here we do have evidence of prior research, that should have led the question asker to area 51, or better still to conclude that they need an existing set of interested people to launch a new site successfully. That question has an upvote so the question asker did come out ahead in rep there.

• Are questions asking about a standard way of doing things automatically an opinion based question?

Simply too broad a question to work for every possible site. Nobody could answer this in a way that covered every one of our sites and was ultimately useful. Really this question needs to be asked on site metas and in fact it almost certainly has been on those meta sites and has answers pertinent to each individual site.

Apart from the last question the rest are duplicates and if you want to answer them, you still can. You just need to put your answer on the original question in each case. That way we keep all the answers together rather than spreading them across dozens of duplicates.