Kurtis Beavers, one of our designers, asked the community team about design decisions that encourage empathy. Paradoxically, I immediately identified one of the most reviled features on Stack Overflow: downvotes. People so dislike being downvoted that we have three separate Zendesk macros explaining the role of downvotes in our system. Many of the earliest feature requests were variations of "Force user to comment on downvote". Not many people seem to think downvotes encourage empathy.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://jlericson.com/2015/05/18/downvotes.html