Please try to not take the negative feedback personally. I hope it will not discourage you from contributing in the future.

My best guess what happened with your previous post was that a lot of people either disliked the proposal, or disliked the fact the you seem to set on creating something "hard to abandon" without seeking much input from the community before. Downvoting the post is cheap way to express such feeling.

I agree that if people collectively downvote, in particular strong downvote, without explaining why, the result of the collective action is bad. (On the other hand it is easy to see why: explanations are costly. I explained why I don't like the proposal, but that may mean I will bear more of the social costs of disagreement or conflict.)

It looks like Jan's comment on your other post was heavily upvoted, indicating general agreement with his concerns, but I'd hope that people with other concerns would have written about them.

I've recommended before that people try to avoid downvoting without either explaining their reasoning or upvoting a response that matched their views. I've been happy to see how common this is, though there's still room for improvement.

Please keep posting and sharing your ideas -- one of the Forum's core purposes is "helping new people with ideas get feedback", and no one entered the EA community with only good ideas to share. (As far as "initial experience with forum use" goes, you're still doing a lot better than GiveWell's Holden Karnofsky circa 2007.)

Perhaps a prompt to give optional anonymous, private, and/or brief constructive feedback after each upvote/downvote could help posters learn what was good/bad about the post while avoiding most of the costs of posting a lengthy comment.

I am personally not a fan of the strong upvote and strong downvote system. I think problems with that system may be coming into play here. I'm not sure how the algorithm actually works, but it seems like a small number of voters can dramatically reduce the total vote count of a comment or post, and that scenario reflects that minority's opinion much more than it may reflect overall perceptions. Highly penalizing posts that are generally perceived as fine by many but perceived as problematic by a few is a serious concern to take into account.

I liked the old system better where votes were weighted equally, and the proportion of positive and negative votes was transparently disclosed to everyone. Anyone who disagrees strongly with a position can simply write a comment, and if that comment is more upvoted than the original post, that typically reflects the strength of the opposing argument. Strong downvotes might reduce the incentive to have informed discussion in favor of blind disagreement.

I feel similarly! I like your idea of a prompt before downvoting new users. Perhaps in general there could be a message with no user action required that appears whenever a downvote is made to encourage people to downvote with an explanatory comment in the event the reason for downvoting isn't obvious (i.e. it hasn't already been expressed in a comment).