Could you please link to the question? I don't mean to be adversarial but in the past when I checked the questions people complained were downvoted for no reason there were indeed reasons. Perhaps the guidelines have subtly changed since your last experience and we can give you feedback on it.
This response is honestly part of the problem though. I understand not wanting many duplicate questions, and wanting a well written question/response style. However, different people approach differently problems differently. For every person who asks a question there are likely several others who didnt bother to post or were intimidated by the requirements to even get involved in SO. It seems like it’s been gamified to the point that it excludes newcomers.
A newcomer shouldn’t have to know the subtleties of the guidelines. When I go to the library and ask the librarian a question they don’t reprimand me for the formulation of my question. They don’t refer me to the weekly research/reference class (which is great by the way). They try to help me find what I’m looking for. Sometimes I find questions on SO through google that are dupes, but if it weren’t for that dupe I may never have found the original with the search terms that I used.
This isn’t to say that SO’s rules are wrong, I just believe that there are those who are more concerned with the decorum than the functionality. Unfortunately it feels like those users outnumber the functional ones.
There might have been reasons. But then when you ask for them in the comments section, people would just answer "you don't need to provide a reason to downvote". So actually you never learn.
The other issue is, even when the reason is given, sometimes you would not agree with that. E.g. sometimes people claim it's a duplicate, although they are not deep enough into the topic to really tell, and then the question gets closed. Or people claim is subjective, while in fact objective answers are possible. Or many other things.
Do people really comment this? I've never seen anyone comment anything along the lines of "you don't need to provide a reason to downvote" on a question they are downvoting. I would probably call them out and/or flag a mod if I saw it. Is this a very recent thing?
That being said, I agree that Stack Overflow has a duplicate issue.
