I don't downvote terribly often; when I do, I try to either /msg the poster in the Chatterbox, or post a follow-up explaining why I downvoted the node. Admittedly, I don't do this as often as I probably should; in some cases, a post will come off as trollish or gratuitously immature, in which case I doubt that my explanation will lead to a rational discussion on self-improvement.

As for your node, it's a bit densely formatted and difficult to read (code tags would make the second paragraph a bit more legible), and Data::Dumper is preferred over Srinivasan's dumpvar.pl (the latter, if I recall correctly, was meant as an illustration of how references work, not a serious programming tool), but those don't strike me as good reasons to downvote the node.