The downvote button is marked "shows no research effort".
Where's the "I looked at this manual and that tutorial and this debugger and tried these things"? Nowhere, which makes it feel like "I put no effort in stackoverflow do it for me".
The downvote button is an awful way to do what it purports to do. In practise it's percieved as more of an "oh fuck off" button.
It's a single mouse click by a single person (or maybe a bot), but it carries so much weight.
Yeah, one of SO's problems is people using its question system to cache-hit other people's brains instead of having to spend 2 seconds on google.
I can't really agree with any posts here that think the solution is to tolerate it with poor question quality and duplicates. But good luck doing that in a way that doesn't grate on anyone.
Personally I try to use my downvotes only as a last resort, for factually wrong answers or questions where clarification attempts went nowhere.
[edit] I should have done my research before asking the question :P Apparently downvoting on S.O. does cost reputation/points. I guess the actual cost is so small it seems to be in the doesn't-matter category, at least for me as I didn't even notice. Perhaps if the cost was higher...
[edit2] I looked it up, and the cost is indeed trivial - one point. An upvote on your answer provides 10 points, and you can of course receive many upvotes for a good answer. The cost of downvoting is really only significant for a new/low reputation user. High reputation users can still be poor-downvoters. Seems to me there's a lot of opportunity to tweak the costs of downvoting to reduce the negative aspects of it.
You need 125 rep to be able to cast a down vote (votes for people and anonymous users with less than 125 are recorded in an anonymous votes table ( for example, http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/209365/ano... ).
Hacker News has down votes too... and you can't down vote until you get a certain amount of karma.
The rep lost from down votes are an investment in site quality that you get back if the post is deleted.
Maybe that's not how most people do it?
I have several well recived answers there but I have never downvoted anyone because leaving it as is feels right than downvoting for the reasons you mentioned. I never asked a question there and tried figuring out the answers based on existing resources and on my own and it helped me learning a lot. This might not be the right way but being hostile and downvoting feels more than disagreement to me. This is the reason why I avoid being there.
I agree with your observation but Jon Skeet's essay seemed to be focusing on something else... the culture of hostility (or perceived hostility). The key words I noticed he used (multiple times) were "hostility", "jerks", "feelings".
On the other hand, the keywords I would associate with your observation would be... "boredom", "novelty of a new website", "low hanging fruit to quickly build easy karma", etc.
To discuss Jon's specific angle, let's use an example of a [tag] that's fairly new technology such as "[vue.js]". Since Vue is 2014, it doesn't have the "completeness of answers" of a very old tag like C# from 2008.
Here's a Vue question sitting downvoted to negative 4: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49345098/how-to-get-prop...
Maybe his question deserved all those downvotes. I don't know enough about Vue to guess if the downvotes were all caused by a pasted screenshot instead of pure text.
To Jon's "culture" essay, is the minus-4 the optimal way to communicate it's a "bad" question? Is it a bad question because of its format (the screenshot) or was it bad because "props" is a trivial LMGTFY (Let Me Google That For You Question)?
Here's another Vue question at negative 1: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49321665/how-to-add-a-ge...
To generalize, if there's "[new technology]" that opens a vast untaken area for new contributions of answers, is the culture created by Stackoverflow's mechanisms (the downvotes, the karma system, the moderators' powers, the "closings" vs "moving", etc) ... the best incentive system to minimize hostility?
Are Jon's well-intentioned "covenants" realistic? Or are they naive to human tendencies when any website is open to mass participation?