- Downvoting without offering feedback is not a nice or effective solution to the stated problem.
- There are plenty of nonbasic questions that follow all of the guidelines and still receive downvotes, and there is also much downvoting of answers, so this doesn't account for all of the negative behavior.
- When someone does ask a question specifically about the English language and of interest to linguists or language experts, the question gets single-sentence answers from high-rep (5-50k) users, suggested as more appropriate for LinguisticsSE (and now apparently migrated there)suggested as more appropriate for LinguisticsSE (and now apparently migrated there), or closed as off-topic (and now apparently migrated to LinguisticsSE)closed as off-topic (and now apparently migrated to LinguisticsSE) -- oh, and of course, it gets plenty of downvotes.
- There are tons and tons of open, answered questions on this site that are very basic, have the same exact general answer, and are currently being answered, e.g., "What's the difference between [foo] and [foo with a productive derivational suffix affixed]?", so the downvoting and closing seems arbitrary or worse.
replaced http://linguistics.stackexchange.com/ with https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/
replaced http://english.stackexchange.com/ with https://english.stackexchange.com/