Post History

I'm sorry that you had a poor first experience here. Receiving downvotes is never pleasant.

However, there are a few things in your post I'd like to address.

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Fundamentally, upvotes and downvotes are a way of determining a post's *quality*. It has nothing to do with the author.  
Of course, quality is a subjective term, so saying that votes are cast based on a post's quality isn't actually very helpful, so let's get a bit into what "quality" means here.

In your addition to this question, you say that if someone cannot understand your post, they should refrain from editing it. **A post being unclear is not high quality**. If a post is poorly written and people can't get the point, it's going to get downvotes - because that's low-quality.  

Quality is determined by a combination of **usefulness, accuracy, and presentation**.

A post should be *useful*; i.e., have a point. A post that lacks any reason for why it exists is *unlikely* to be of any interest to people.  
A post should be *accurate*; the information presented within a post should be correct, sourced, and not based on a false premise. While a question based on a false premise can lead to good answers correcting this false premise, it's best to try to make sure you understand what you're talking about.  
And a post should be *presented* well. This includes formatting, sourcing, and clarity. While there is of course some leniency in this - not everyone has perfect English, for instance, and everyone makes typos - a post that is entirely unclear and not formatted well is difficult to understand, as well as showing a lack of effort on the part of the original poster. (If they can't be bothered to take the time to explain or to format their post, why should someone take the time to answer their question?)

With all this in mind, though, quality is still going to be subjective; everyone can decide how they are determining quality and cast their votes how they want (in a non-abusive manner).

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Now, as for the anonymity of votes and requiring a reason...

When people downvote, they're doing it because they think the post is low-quality. That's *already providing a reason*. If we require people to type in a reason, they're not going to give specific feedback on the post; they'll just write "low quality" or "unclear" or "sdkuyshbakusdv", to make the downvote go through. Requiring a reason for such a basic feature like voting doesn't make much sense if we want to encourage people to actually use the voting feature.

Votes are also currently anonymous to avoid creating instances where people vote in biased ways. "This person downvoted me, so I'll downvote them!" is a situation we want to avoid, as well as the converse (people upvoting the folks who upvoted their posts); we want to make sure that votes stay focused on the *post*, not the person.

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You say that we're not getting much traffic at the moment, and that downvotes will drive away new people who come to post. This is not an invalid point. We *don't* currently have that much traffic - but we're working on it.  
But without a quality-measuring system - which involves downvotes in its current implementation - we'll get more posts, sure... but *lower-quality* posts. 

We don't want to sacrifice quality for quantity. We'd prefer a smaller selection of high-quality posts over a larger selection of low-quality posts, even if that means that the site stays rather small for now.

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We currently do not have a built-in chat, unlike Mi Yodeya. However, we do have a [Discord server](https://discord.gg/VEguHnU) that you can join to discuss the site.

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You've made a lot of rather disjointed points here, but hopefully I managed to address your core concerns. I'm happy to answer further requests for clarity in the comments.