My first reaction was oh great a private comment reply so no one can see who wrote that comment and is only visible to the original poster. I think it’s an incr

My first reaction was oh great a private comment reply so no one can see who wrote that comment and is only visible to the original poster. I think it’s an incredibly nuanced subject why people downvote. On sites like stack overflow or quora where there is more structure around answers and questions a cookie-cutter type response as to why somethings are downvoted may be a good approach but not on hacker news type sites. It would be a great idea to create a tool that allows others to leave a private reply anonymously so one can learn at least what others are thinking when they downvote even if one does not agree with the provided reply. The anonymous reply could be visible to everyone also as long as it remains anonymous I think is the key. In fact it could even improve the community if serial downvoters are required to leave replies instead of downvoting an unpopular comment to the abyss.