And .. I downvoted you. I hope it will sting. People giving up free time to add value to your thing and you blame them for the site problems? Then the site design is really failing, if the problem is all the people being engaged with it.
Whereas on stackoverflow when I downvote it’s for “this question shows no research effort” which is the downvote button tooltip, but a single downvote is felt as a personal attack on character.
Stackoverflow is for programmers - people whose character traits are tainted to be nitpicky about small details - yet the bad experience angry posts call answers traffic cops and Martinets - exactly the kind of people who could help get your code past the compiler or browser or api or whatever.
“Neutral” responses feel like negative ones (see: “what have you tried?”).
As an answerer more than an asker, if I help someone understand then I feel good, if it seems someone asks from a sense of “help me” I’m endeared to the question and if they ask from a sense of “solve my business problem” I feel more abused (personally or site-being-abused) and resentful.
No amount of Jon Skeet blog posting about the classic usenet popup “this reply will be sent to thousands of people who will have to spend time and money on it, are you sure?” seems to work on the modern web.
If it were me reworking it, I’d get rid of the low quality question idea, let answered be the judge of that and google sort the wheat from chaff.
Then get rid of downvotes and close votes and “neutral” comments.
Leave only room for feedback buttons that in some way communicate “I tried to answer your question but couldn’t, Your question might be more answerable if ..”
Forget being a repository of high quality questions and answers in the same way software has forgotten about big design up front and perfect quality goals and turned into “put an MVP on GitHub and let the issue tracker be the driving force”.
The goal of “stop duplicates, everything that can be questioned and answered has been questioned and answered” forgets that there are 150,000 new humans every day, and thousands more existing people learning to code - a goal of turning everyone away with “that’s already finished nothing for you to do here” is .. daft.
Questions and answers are, if nothing else, practise. A good way to learn is to try explaining it to someone else - SO churn has that room.
But not on stack overflow, where following the site plan for downvotes and closevotes makes everyone feel shitty.
I even doubt it is “high quality questions” that are supported but a combination of “this question feels like the asker is like me” combined with “and they’re asking about a thing I like and feel positively about rather than an edge case of the tool I feel bad about and wish the asker would politely overlook it like the rest of “us” all do”.