And your 50% figures leave no room for neutrality.

That is why I said For the nodes that I do vote on, I think it is only normal that 50% is down and 50% is up. Context is everything.

I don't vote a lot. When I vote, I think there should be as many downvotes as upvotes. In practice, most votes are upvotes, simply because there aren't that many bad nodes...

The only bit of information I can glean from them is that there are some jackasses around.

How unfortunate. That way, the downvotes were a waste of time. Someone's very subtly trying to tell you your post could have been much better. Not always do people reply or message you when you do something wrong, because you're supposed to in many cases be able to find out what was wrong yourself.

Should you be unable to guess why people downvote and still want to know, you can always ask in an update. I've done that several times and so far it has always worked.

But please, don't think that someone who downvotes is a jackass. If someone downvotes your post, that means they care enough about what you wrote to let you know that they don't like it. It's a bit like a relationship: you fight because you CARE.

Just so you know: I downvoted this node's parent node because you didn't pay attention. (Note that I always try to vote on replies to my nodes. People who take the time to answer me IMHO deserve to know what I think of their answers.)