At the risk of being downvoted (!) I think I want to push back a bit here (not to say I fully disagree though).
Yes, silent downvoting is important to the Forum, but that doesn’t mean that there can’t be downsides. I think this problem is especially pertinent with top-level posts, since downvotes can’t distinguish between “this is bad content/this breaks forum norms” and “this is something I disagree with”.
I don’t think it’s fair to say that everyone who downvotes (or upvotes) a post is required to give a comment explaining why (perhaps there’s more of a case if someone up or down votes strongly). But it’s a bit of a collective action problem, where it’d probably be good if at least someone explained why but no individual voter is obligated to.
Another case where silent downvoting might be more problematic is where a comment/post is longer than usual, or dealing with more complex topics, or covering different ideas in one go. If a good faith post/comment like this that gets downvoted, I think the Forum would be served a bit better if there was more discussion about why that perhaps it does usually. That is a subjective viewpoint of mine though.
At the risk of being downvoted (!) I think I want to push back a bit here (not to say I fully disagree though).
Yes, silent downvoting is important to the Forum, but that doesn’t mean that there can’t be downsides. I think this problem is especially pertinent with top-level posts, since downvotes can’t distinguish between “this is bad content/this breaks forum norms” and “this is something I disagree with”.
I don’t think it’s fair to say that everyone who downvotes (or upvotes) a post is required to give a comment explaining why (perhaps there’s more of a case if someone up or down votes strongly). But it’s a bit of a collective action problem, where it’d probably be good if at least someone explained why but no individual voter is obligated to.
Another case where silent downvoting might be more problematic is where a comment/post is longer than usual, or dealing with more complex topics, or covering different ideas in one go. If a good faith post/comment like this that gets downvoted, I think the Forum would be served a bit better if there was more discussion about why that perhaps it does usually. That is a subjective viewpoint of mine though.