The more interesting argument for that norm is that it makes people accountable for their downvotes and therefore less likely to give dishonestly motivated downvotes.
There’s still no obligation to upvote anything, so if it’s plainly visible that a post is bad and no one cares to explain why it’ll just sit at 0. Downvotes become important when some people (incorrectly) think a post is good, because then it will accrue a positive score if uncorrected. But in that case the downvoter thinks they understand something the upvoters don’t, so maybe they should be explain.
The problem with downvotes without accountability is that if I post something about how people named Taylor are statistically likely to be <bad thing>, it might be true and well supported and important and empathetic… and still you could still just downvote it to censor what you don’t like while most people don’t care enough either way to vote. So we get good posts systematically suppressed in ways that wouldn’t happen if you had to comment “Downvoted because my name is Taylor”, whenever a minority is hostile to a particular truth.
Downvote explanations could be hidden by default so it wouldn’t spill over, but I find myself frequently expanding “comment scored below threshold” to see what it is the community in question really doesn’t want people to think. These comments are rarely boringly bad.
Most of the content on this website is more interesting and engaging than a bunch of downvote-explanation comments would be.
The more interesting argument for that norm is that it makes people accountable for their downvotes and therefore less likely to give dishonestly motivated downvotes.
There’s still no obligation to upvote anything, so if it’s plainly visible that a post is bad and no one cares to explain why it’ll just sit at 0. Downvotes become important when some people (incorrectly) think a post is good, because then it will accrue a positive score if uncorrected. But in that case the downvoter thinks they understand something the upvoters don’t, so maybe they should be explain.
The problem with downvotes without accountability is that if I post something about how people named Taylor are statistically likely to be <bad thing>, it might be true and well supported and important and empathetic… and still you could still just downvote it to censor what you don’t like while most people don’t care enough either way to vote. So we get good posts systematically suppressed in ways that wouldn’t happen if you had to comment “Downvoted because my name is Taylor”, whenever a minority is hostile to a particular truth.
Downvote explanations could be hidden by default so it wouldn’t spill over, but I find myself frequently expanding “comment scored below threshold” to see what it is the community in question really doesn’t want people to think. These comments are rarely boringly bad.