One thing that you - and everyone else who complains about downvotes - need to keep in mind is that the main purpose of votes is not to give feedback to the person who wrote the post. The main purpose is to tell everyone else who reads the post what the community thinks about it.
I keep an eye on a few other SE sites and it's interesting that on ALL of them, you see the exact same complaint:
Why is this site so unfriendly? On other SE sites people are more helpful.
Most recently, I was reading some posts on meta.EE, and they have a more-or-less concensus that they should downvote and vote to close crappy questions as quickly as possible.
https://electronics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3961/downvoting-questions-or-answers
There aren't many answers or comments yet, but it look like the EE.SE regulars think their harsh attitude is working:
