I guess people tend to have different ways of communicating with each other, and I would like to think that as a professional kind of community that we can offer each other the respect and courtesy to provide constructive feedback and comments to help improve the quality of responses.
In saying that, would making it mandatory for people to provide explanations for upvotes and downvotes help or hinder this?
Voting on SE is anonymous. That means that we can't force users to add comments while they vote. Up votes is pretty straight forward: a user found the answer useful. But down votes are different. That's why we on every down vote encourage people to explain what's wrong. But we can't force them to add a comment.
Here on UX.SE it's an unwritten rule that you add a comment when you down vote. And users who down vote will hear from the community (if they see the answer again) that they should comment.
But making it mandatory would destroy the intention of SE.
More to read: Encouraging people to explain downvotes
