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Feature request for @downvoters contact

Not often but a few times I've had negative responses to my answers. I would love to be able to query those that responded that I needed to improve. That kind of athe generic contact@downvoters would be a nice easy way to do so without giving up voting anonymity.

Not sure how many others would be interested.

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    I'm going to close this, not because it's a bad question, but because there's already a discussion from almost 3 years ago on meta.stackoverflow which covers the same ground: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/37090/… Nov 25, 2012 at 20:36
  • (sadly, no official comment from the SE team though, maybe a bump could be used to remind them of it?) Nov 25, 2012 at 20:37

2 Answers 2

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I think this comes down to a case of "If they wan't to comment, then they will."

Don't get me wrong, I know exactly where you're coming from, but I don't think addressing a comment to them will help. Additionally, I suspect it'll only encourage low quality users to start ranting and raving even more at their downvoters.

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Implementing this feature will mean that I'll be passing out more "Be Civil!" temporary suspensions, and to names we all see a lot of.

The intentional disconnect between anonymous-criticism and those that desire explanations for the -1 is one of the bigger ways we prevent flame wars. It's bad enough when some 1-rep user starts casting aspersions on the downvoters generically in a comment, but allowing them to do so directly in the inboxes of the downvoters is a level of escalation several of our regulars won't be able to resist.

The only way this would work out would be if it's gated on rep. It doesn't work until you have 500 rep, something big enough to exclude both classes a newbs (101-rep transfers, and 1-rep new users) and have enough rep to perhaps know some of what we like to have in civil discourse.

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