



  • Every downvote should be accompanied by a mandatory comment
  • Downvotes should be accompanied by a mandatory, anonymous comment
  • The first downvote should be accompanied by a mandatory comment
  • Downvotes should cost reputation points unless accompanied by a comment
  • …and other variations.


Why are all of these ideas rejected?


Classic troll in the mountains, intimidating a boy with his horse "We're not here to write your code for you, newbie!!" (Image source)

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  • 68
    I just saw this on a comment today: idownvotedbecau.se – Johnny Mopp Oct 5 '17 at 12:37
  • 7
    @JohnnyMopp If you find it useful, use it. I'm hoping it helps a little in the long run... – user1228 Oct 5 '17 at 15:25
  • 38
  • 3
    This has probably been suggested before, but: if you downvote and justify your downvote, you don’t lose the 1 rep. Otherwise, you do. Is there any problem with this? – cs95 Oct 7 '17 at 3:54
  • 9
    Voting is meant to be 'friction-free'. Perhaps when someone offers a comment without having down-voted that fact could be marked somehow prominently on the comment. This might lessen the likelihood of retributive responses. (Probably suggested many times before now.) – Bill Bell Oct 7 '17 at 20:54
  • 68
    It's funny how no one ever questions the upvotes. – faintsignal Apr 7 '18 at 17:10
  • 2
  • 6
    The canonical is Encouraging people to explain downvotes. – Peter Mortensen Oct 4 '18 at 18:10
  • 2
    Ultimately, it's askers' responsibility to familiarize themselves with site standards; it's not downvoters' job to educate askers on this. – EJoshuaS - Reinstate Monica Aug 5 '19 at 18:48
  • reposted to MSE – gnat Sep 3 '19 at 11:18

Forcing downvotes to be accompanied by a comment sounds like a good idea at first, and many here would like to see new users get all the info they need to ask questions that are a better fit! Contrary to popular opinion, most users here are nice and want to help rather than enjoying "shooting down" newbies' questions with downvotes to make them feel bad and unwelcome.

However, Stack Overflow has become a big city. Big cities need different rules to survive than small villages - and tend to feel more anonymous and harsh as a result.





  • Any requirement could be trivially circumvented by entering gibberish or something nonconstructive like "this is bad". Detecting and stopping those who enter such stuff through moderation/administrative action is simply not feasible on a site with millions of users.







  • We can't accommodate everyone. There will always be more question-askers out there than there are competent answerers. You can't overburden the latter by allowing a huge quantity of bad or badly-fitting questions into the system—you'd destroy the entire system, and hence prevent any questions from getting answered. Not getting to ask your question on SO isn't a death sentence; many SO veterans have questions every day that they don't pose on Stack Overflow because they know they wouldn't be a good fit under the current model. The resources those veterans turn to to solve their problems are usually open to everyone on the Internet - they just take time, effort, and sometimes periods of frustration to understand. There's also other, more mentoring-oriented resources to turn to.

  • 28
    I'm now wondering if an automatic comment should be triggered on the first downvote pointing the user to the How to ask page. Maybe something like "It looks like your question could be improved, we suggest looking at the How To Ask page to improve it". – Matthieu M. Oct 6 '17 at 15:12
  • 5

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