My initial reaction is to really like the idea of being prompted to give anonymous feedback. I think there probably are also reasons against this, but maybe it’s at least worth thinking about.
(One reason why I like this is that it would be helpful for authors and mitigate problems such as the one expressed by the OP. Another reason is that it might change the patterns of downvotes in ways that are beneficial. For example, I currently almost never downvote something that’s not spam, but quite possibly it wouldn’t be optimal if everyone used downvotes as narrowly [though I’m not sure and feel confused about the proper role of downvotes in general]. At the same time, I often feel like the threshold for explaining my disagreement in a non-anonymous comment would be too high. I anticipate that the opportunity to add anonymous feedback to a downvote would sometimes make me express useful concerns or disagreements I currently don’t express.)
My initial reaction is to really like the idea of being prompted to give anonymous feedback. I think there probably are also reasons against this, but maybe it’s at least worth thinking about.
(One reason why I like this is that it would be helpful for authors and mitigate problems such as the one expressed by the OP. Another reason is that it might change the patterns of downvotes in ways that are beneficial. For example, I currently almost never downvote something that’s not spam, but quite possibly it wouldn’t be optimal if everyone used downvotes as narrowly [though I’m not sure and feel confused about the proper role of downvotes in general]. At the same time, I often feel like the threshold for explaining my disagreement in a non-anonymous comment would be too high. I anticipate that the opportunity to add anonymous feedback to a downvote would sometimes make me express useful concerns or disagreements I currently don’t express.)