...question was not why you downvote, but why you downvote and do not supply an explanation

Quote wikipedia "A vote, or a ballot, is an individual's act of voting, by which he or she express support or preference for a certain motion... A secret ballot, the standard way to protect voters' political privacy... The act of voting in most countries is voluntary..."

Voting in a democratic system is thus by definition typically secret and voluntary. The reason for this is to promote honesty and freedom in the casting of votes, -- no explicit or implicit ties, agendas or consequences. Only the raw statistical summation of pros & cons. This data in itself is of great value.

Looking back i've been downvoted relatively few times, and never were any reason given. Likewise i've downvoted only a couple of times, and not myself given any written explanation. That said, it was always clear to me WHY i was downvoted: i had not done the basic homework expected and needed to ask fellow monks to spend time working over my problem description and insufficient code examples. I learned from that, and improved in future posts, and thus the raw downvoting had an immediate effect. Yes, if i/you have the time to explain a downvote, i agree that may be recommendable, but we can't demand and not even expect this, given the limited time we all have. And my experience is, that an explanation is hardly ever necessary.

sub z{$_[13]^=' ';ucfirst("@_\n");}print z(map{(split//,
   'lash jerk thereunto carp,'
)[$_]}map{ord(uc($_)^'@')}split//,
'eobjdaprqcfgiwlm@skuthnvx');

[download]

===========================================================
As the eternal tranquility of Truth reveals itself to us, this very place is the Land of Lotuses
-- Hakuin Ekaku Zenji

In reply to Re: Why downvote nodes without commenting on them? by ady
in thread Why downvote nodes without commenting on them? by danmcb

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.