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

https://electronics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2740/why-are-electronics-se-questions-getting-down-voted-so-often

There aren't many answers or comments yet, but it look like the EE.SE regulars think their harsh attitude is working:

https://electronics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3972/is-the-strict-attitude-towards-questions-working