Downvotes - comment or negative reputation?

Question

I have a question about the efficient use of downvotes. People are downvoting without any comments; such behaviour is not necessarily constructive, but I generally agree with the logic presented in earlier questions such as this one or this one. However, there are clear downsides for this as well.

1. Without any comments at all, there is no way for the poster to know how to improve her/his post.
2. Even in the case that the poster "guesses" what could be disliked, and significantly improves the post, there is no way to inform the people who downvoted. When there are comments, you can always respond to the comment and let the downvoter know about the improvement, but without that you can just hope that somehow they come back to the post and reread, which is not very likely.

Such behaviour discourages efforts to improve posts, particularly for the inexperienced people. In order to improve this situation, would it be possible to implement a feature to "ping" the downvoters in the event of significant updates? This would also discourage downvoting, perhaps better than assigning negative reputation.

Or alternatively, could be possible to implement a middle ground solution like this: When a downvote is cast, apply a negative reputation penalty only if NONE of the following is done:

• Write a comment
• Upvote an already existing comment
• Agree to be pinged back

This way, if you are in a bad mood and downvote, you still get the reputation penalty; but if you spend the effort to give constructive feedback, you will not. Moreover, the posters will have a better incentive to improve their posts, as they have a chance to reach back to you and get you to reconsider your downvote and perhaps turn that into an upvote.

Answer 1

The request to have a ping for @downvoters has been requested and declined by staff on Meta Stack Exchange because of the badness that would come from it, so I'll move past that part.

You may also be interested in reading: Why is an answer being downvoted without any comments?.

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You've made this request on a premise that isn't reliably true: the premise that there's usually a helpful comment we can leave to improve a post.

One of the most common reasons for downvoting a post though is "I think this post is wrong / giving bad advice / incorrect / fundamentally something I disagree with." There's no useful comment we can leave there to suggest improvement when we feel that way. In this circumstance we prefer the voter does not leave a comment; actually expressing that they think the post is wrong reliably creates prolonged or heated arguments which moderators have to intervene in and delete an hour later.

People already very regularly leave comments when a post can be genuinely improved, so I'm satisfied that's happening enough. (Not 100% of the time, but enough.) Sometimes a post will look blank because these comments have already been acted upon and removed.

Many strongly downvoted posts go without comments, and most of the time, that's for the best.

Answer 2

Based on doppelspookers answer it seem like we don’t want to force comments on downvotes because we don’t want unhelpful arguments to ensue.

That being said, down voting without a reason leads to new users feeling unwelcome, and potentially leaving. This is an undesirable outcome.

If that’s the case, why can we request a 3rd option: standardised downvote reasons, specified by the moderators of the relevant se. Downvotes could then be disallowed if they don’t select a reason.

The way I’m imagining is that they would be similar to tags, which would show the number of downvotes that have been given for particular reasons, without identifying the particular users.

To avoid it polluting highly upvoted posts, there could be an option to hide these downvote reasons after a post has attracted a net of [insert number here] upvotes.

This would enable the poster to get valuable feedback, while also avoiding comment fights (because there would be no one specific for the poster to argue with).