I don't care if you get frustrated or annoyed at downvotes. That's the WHOLE POINT. As you make comments and continue to be voted up and down you learn the kind of things the community approves and disapproves of, or you get out. Downvoting isn't designed to optimize for being welcoming. It's a moderation strategy designed to improve conversation for the existing participants.

Actually, the more I think about this idea the more I dislike it. It's much easier to learn what is and isn't acceptable behavior if people just tell you rather than you having to suss it out yourself. Further, in many cases the reasoning for downvotes is far from clear, even for established users.

I have >4000 karma, I've written multiple top-level posts, I'm frequently on the top 30-day karma list, I know many community members in real life, and I've donated to and volunteered for both MIRI and CFAR-- and even I am not always sure why some posts get downvoted. Imagine how much worse it must be for new users!

I've often heard people complain that LessWrong isn't welcoming enough, that it's intimidating, that it's hard to participate in discussions here, etc. In some cases, this simply means that LessWrong's level of rigor is too high for the person making the complaint, and that's totally fine. But I also know a lot of intelligent, level-headed people who are interested in rationality and other core LessWrong concepts, but don't post here because they find the site's attitude towards newcomers off-putting.

There are various efforts being put in place to help address this-- for instance, many of Eliezer's original sequences are being compiled into an edited ebook format that should make it much easier for people to access the "core" of LessWrong. But I think that changing either the actual architecture of LessWrong or the culture so that we give more of an explanation for downvotes would be a great help for both existing users and newcomers.

Lastly, it's certainly the case that well-kept gardens die by pacifism, and we should be careful about lowering the standards on LessWrong. I think the current standards on LessWrong are part of what makes the site valuable, and I don't want to lower them-- but making them more transparent would IMO certainly help.