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Proposal: Hinduism

There are many valid questions down-voted with no possible reasons. So, when down-voting a question, please do comment about your reason to down-vote the question. This will help others to understand what is wrong about that question and in creating constructive discussions which will improve the site.

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    They don't agree or think the question would be a good fit. That is reason enough. Forcing a comment will solve nothing. It will result in less quality questions, because people will avoid downvotes
    – Cody Guldner
    Commented Aug 14, 2013 at 15:41
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    Well, what I'm asking is to state the reason why they don't think/agree a question to be a good fit. I don't understand how commenting on down-voting can reduce the quality of questions. People won't hesitate to down-vote and justify their action if they genuinely feel that the question should be down-voted for some reason. Moreover, it will help to reduce the malicious down-votes because people may hesitate before down-voting a question without a proper reason. By the way, nobody is forcing anything here; I'm just suggesting that commenting for down-votes might help to improve the site.
    – TheLoneKing
    Commented Aug 14, 2013 at 15:52
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    This is about same proposal "HINDUISM". Why some users are downvoting questions with 10 upvotes? on 4/9/2013, we needed 3 more questions with 10 upvotes, on 5/9/2013, 4 questions are downvoted and now we need 7 questions with 10 upvotes. Every downvoter should be enforced to mention reason with the downvote.
    – DroidDev
    Commented Sep 5, 2013 at 13:20
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    I get some similar problem with my questions, they are put to hold telling me they were off topic. I think the best reason is the people who are down voting or making questions hold are having very less knowledge about the topic, resulting in v.less understanding, some deep digged questions will confuse them resulting in downvotes, even question holds.
    – K Cloud
    Commented Nov 5, 2013 at 8:11
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    The whole topic is even more important because there is a limit on upvotes but no limit on downvotes -- I also noted that to downvote you do not even have to follow a proposal! So that leaves some hidden control to whom it may benefit (maybe StackExchange itself?).
    – gwr
    Commented Feb 26, 2016 at 17:01

2 Answers 2

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There is no requirement on any Stack Exchange site to explain your downvotes.

And there shouldn't be.

Should everyone explain why they upvote? If you think someone should be required to comment when downvoting, you should think they need to leave one when upvoting, too. It is precisely the same mechanism - just in the other direction.

If someone wishes to leave a comment with an explanation, they can. Or not.

Requiring comments when downvoting could easily lead to vendettas being taken against someone who downvotes a lot. Or buddy-voting for people who upvote a lot.

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    It is not the same because usually hater don't check the question/answer but just downvote. But non-hater usually need to somehow check the question/answer. So it is easier for hater to downvote than for non-hater to upvote. It is good visible on area51 where haters without knowledge downvote on questions which are obviously good/valid for specialists who know the field.
    – Kamil Kiełczewski
    Commented Jan 4, 2021 at 13:13
  • @KamilKiełczewski - it IS exactly the same: it's a "vote". A tally mark in one column or the other. No more. No less.
    – warren
    Commented Jan 5, 2021 at 13:27
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An additional reason to require comments is to be sure the negative points being assigned to the user who posted the question are justified and not arbitrary. Maybe the person leaving the down-vote doesn't understand the question because he or she has very little knowledge of what the question discusses. Or maybe someone is revenge-down-voting a question because the asker down-voted or somehow negatively impacted something the revenger did.

I just had a question get down-voted and it really baffled me because, as a user of the software, I really feel it is a valid question. On top of that, being new to Area 51, I was taken below the threshold for doing pretty much anything on this site. So someone just took away my ability to participate in Area 51 and has no requirement to answer for the action. It is very discouraging.

I was wondering why there there appears to be such sparse activity in Area 51 compared to other StackExchange sites. Is the difficulty in participating here the reason?

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