I found the first answer insightful: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/252340/1862046

Roughly, it seems downvotes are used by people to indicate not enough effort has gone into the question (easily researched, duplicate question, confusing/poor english, etc).

So either all unflagged questions is valid and should be nurtured into clear, well-written queries or pointed to existing questions, or questions are to be judged* "good-faith" or "lazy" by users and the latter receive downvotes.

*This judgement is fixed in time; the question is not necessarily re-judged if improvements are made.

What's the problem with being lazy? If you are even lazier, just don't answer. If it's a duplicate, just link it to the delicate question. Having useless questions shouldn't be a problem while searching for answers.

The problem is that just looking through the queue of unanswered questions takes effort.

If I have a list of good, honestly-asked questions, I'm willing to look for a few that I know how to answer and answer them. If I have a vast pile of "plz do this homework for me [transcribed question with errors or link to a private PDF]" then I just won't use Stack Overflow.

All SO tags I've ever followed the number of people answering is greater than the people asking, so that's not really an issue, I think. Although, maybe, it felt that way due to down voting.

The case you described is easy to identify and you can just leave a comment, which will be useful to both: other people answering questions and the person asking. Different from the down vote.

That's what flagging is for. Why don't people flag more?

Here is a discussion of requiring leaving feedback when downvoting:

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436

Why don't people like it? Because SO is full of people who just love to down-vote. Your proposal would take power away from them

Lets build a toxic community!

That's ironic

In case of post on meta, the downvotes means "I disagree with this proposal", not that the question isn't good.

Which is kind of a perfect example of how downvotes are a bad interface - what they mean is context-sensitive, and needs to be explained. If meta had an explicit "disagree" flag, instead of an obtuse "downvote" that users have to intuit the meaning of, it wouldn't have to be explained in a HN comment.

Disagreement doesn't mean they're right about the proposal though.

Not as ironic as you'd think[1].

[1]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/47635