Hi all, I’m sorry if this has already been decided, I tried to search and didn’t see anything that answers my question.
On Stack Exchange, there is an officially encouraged culture of “downvote and move on.” Or in other words, if you don’t like something, you should downvote it. And if you really feel like it, you can suggest an improvement to the author, but… eh. Don’t worry about it too much. Yeah, there’s a small banner at the top of the page asking people to comment if they want, but who reads those anyway?
This leads to the pretty common scenario where an author - often but not always a newer author - makes a post that gets 1 or 2 downvotes, and they see the rep hit in their notification bar, and leave a comment on their own post asking something to the effect of “downvoter, why did you downvote?” More often than not, they get no response, walking away with a feeling of either “gee, people aren’t very welcoming here.” or “what did I do wrong?” Both of which, in my opinion, are not reactions we want people here to have.
People downvote for a couple of reasons. Either they disagree with the answer, they believe it’s poorly written, or they think it breaks the rules (and proceed to flag it.) I believe that, when you downvote on Codidact, a pop-up should come up with these three options and an “other”. (similar to the flag/CV dialog on SE.) This feedback will then anonymously be sent to the user somehow (I’m not sure how), but the downvoter will be given the option to offer more details, which will leave a regular, non-anonymous comment on the post.
This, in my opinion, is a good compromise between the comfort level of the downvoter expressing their thoughts and helping the poster improve their contributions and understand where they may have went wrong.
So what do y’all think? Sorry if I’m overstepping, I know I’m new here; I’ve tried to brush up on some of your more important-looking discussions.