Most of the time, if you are creative enough to work well in Perl, you're probably smart enough to deduce at least the general reason for a downvote.

And this, I think, is where “the human psychology of this particular site” stands, and probably always will:   “downvotes mean that you, personally, are not “–(whatever)– enough,” ergo they are used (merely) as a form of peer-pressure.   Even though they are necessarily attached to a particular post, they are in fact an expression of opinion about a particular person as it was felt by “the minority who actually vote” at that particular point in time.   Not of the post, and accompanied by no explanation of any kind.   All of which therefore generally makes the vote-tallies (and the per-user vote accumulations ...) useless as a metric of post-quality.

The reason why I would quietly harp about this point is, actually, not “a wounded ego.”   To me, a web-site such as this one is primarily valuable as a source of information ... for many years to come.   The day-to-day bickerings among the individual contributors, some of whom might well be dead by the time I stumble-upon their post, are of no importance at all.   Instead, what I am faced with is:   “hundreds of threads in response to my Super Search, and right now I need to determine which three of them I need to read in their entirety.”   I don’t care whether the Peanut Gallery, at that point in time, did or did not feel that the poster was “creative” or “smart.”   But I do care about what the peers, at that point in time, expressed about the quality and relevance of the thread, and especially, why.

PerlMonks runs on very-old software (and not-particularly “beefy” servers ...) that as far as I can tell has never been updated in many years.   But it is, nonetheless, a “go-to source” for information about Perl.   The contributors who cast votes probably will always smugly consider themselves to be the smartest kids in school.   That, too, is of no concern to the information resource.