If a person climbs onto a stage to make a statement, and instead of getting on stage to make a counterpoint someone just shouts “booo” from the audience, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to demand that person to show their face. There’s a certain level of cowardice in simply downvoting without explaining why you disagree. There’s no option to post anonymously here, so it’s not obvious to me that voting should be anonymous either. If people upvote or downvote, they should be willing to stand behind that - and if someone asks for an explanation, you have three choices: ignore them, block them, or explain. I guess there’s also the option to simply not vote at all.

If it were up to me, I’d hide vote counts from users entirely. It’s not all bad, but I’d argue the net effect is negative. Visible votes encourages toxic behavior. When someone makes a controversial claim, you can first downvote them, then dunk on them in a reply - and now they’re being downvoted into oblivion while you get applause for your smug comment. It feels like you’ve won the debate when in reality, nobody’s mind changed. Heavily downvoted comments also prime readers to dislike them before they even read them, instead of approaching with a neutral mindset and then forming their own opinion - or reading further to see other perspectives. As it stands, the system mostly trains people to recognize what’s popular on a platform so they can self-censor to avoid downvotes, and feel validated for shouting down people who voice unpopular opinions.

So, if someone asks me to explain why I downvoted something, I might explain or I might not - but I don’t think it’s an unreasonable thing to ask. On the other hand, if someone makes it their personal mission to follow me around and harass me because I downvoted their comment, I think it’s unreasonable to demand the system be changed just so I don’t have to deal with it. There’s already a solution for that: blocking them.