We get a lot of questions and answers down voted without the voter commenting as to why they down voted.
This is really frustrating because at the lower and of the spectrum it is not constructive criticism and at the other end it could be people with vendettas against other users, which we don't want around here.
A down vote without reason is pointless because the other user doesn't know how they can fix their question/answer to make it better. If you don't have a good reason to down vote, you shouldn't be allowed to do it.
We're supposed to be helping people here and that includes helping people to construct useful questions and answers as much as helping people with Drupal.
I can understand it if someone else has already commented with an explanation but it seems like maybe it would be a good idea to force people to comment if they down vote and there are no existing comments, or maybe have a pop-up when down voting, for the user to enter a comment (kind of like when voting to close or something). This field could even be optional (although in that case I would think the the optional nature should not be made obvious).
I understand that there are also things like spam posts but even if you were forced to enter a comment just write "This is spam" or something (and use the flag spam link).
What do you think of this?
Do you agree it is a problem?
Do you have ideas on how it can we can combat it?