Just a bit of humor...

I don't think such comments should be downvoted if they're a geniune, non-whining attempt to find out what they're doing wrong so if it needs fixing they can fix it.

It's (probably) because you see it as (1) an attempt to play on people's sympathy for the underdog and get upvotes simply for having been downvoted, and (2) an attempt that's likely to work. So (1) you want to discourage such rhetorical trickery and (2) you want to undo the damage it does.

In many other fora with karma systems, I think that's entirely reasonable and correct. LW is (in my judgement) less afflicted than average with exploitative whining about being downvoted; perhaps the response is less appropriate here.

(The other thing about waah-I-was-downvoted complaints is that they divert discussion onto what's usually an irrelevant side topic. Like what's happening now; oops.)

I didn't complain about the first three downvotes I got all in a row yesterday. While I didn't understand why they occurred, I figured the comments were such that it wasn't out of the question for someone to have an issue with all of them. But this one seemed inexplicable, and I wanted it to either go away or explain itself. If I'm actually doing something wrong, I want to know what it is so I can stop doing it deliberately instead of relying on eventual operant conditioning to kill the bad habits. If I'm not actually doing something wrong, then the downvote is unfair and it's kind of others to counteract it.

I tend to downvote posts complaining about being downvoted, not really to counteract "sympathy upvoting", just because it doesn't bring anything to the conversation.

It's true that there should be a way to get information as to "why a post was downvoted", and the only way to do so is to ask, which comes off as "complaining". I don't really see a good solution for this, maybe slashdot-like tags would be better.

What does the intention behind the system's creation have to do with what the system actually does?