How can I use upvotes and downvotes to determine how to improve my questions and answers

Question

I'm a new user still, with only a few questions. I posted some a year ago, and then some very recently.

I saw that my Reputation number went up, and discovered I can actually see the record of up-votes and down-votes. I'm a bit confused, though, when I get some of both for the same question. These are LOW intensity questions, by the way; I think the most responses I have had to any question ever is seven.

Is there any way of determining what elicits a down-vote? So far, I haven't been able to determine what someone found problematic in the things I have written, so I don't know if it's a comment on my grammar, or on suitability. I see that there are specific reasons for issuing a down-vote, but as far as I can tell, which of those issues are the cause for the vote isn't disclosed anywhere.

I just counted, and the ratio of up-votes to down-votes is 5:1, so, maybe this isn't anything I need to be concerned about? I'm just not familiar enough with the platform to know what's going on.

Answer 1

The voting mechanism doesn't provide any qualitative feedback. For helpful suggestions, you're at the mercy of people to leave comments.

I wouldn't spend too much time trying to make sense of any stray down-votes. People vote for a lot of reasons, many of them unrelated to the quality of your question or answer. On the whole your posts are garnering decent up-votes on a site that doesn't get a ton of voting compared to some of the other StackExchange sites.

If one of your posts does receive a high total of negative votes and no one comments, you can always bring it up here on meta. If you ask wanting to learn, someone will probably chime in to help.