[tokenadult]

Listen people, here's how HN works. If you disagree with somebody, you reply.

You'll note I'm taking the trouble to reply. I checked your join date. It is before several of the many repostings of this statement from pg,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

first posted 1592 days ago:

"I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness."

I upvote to approve of posts that I agree with and advance the discussion, and I downvote from time to time if all I have to say on an issue is that the statement in the comment I'm downvoting doesn't warrant agreement. I look at my own comments for reasons why people might disagree with them, but I don't feel obligated, as a reader here, to spell out ALL the details about why I might disagree with a comment to everyone who posts a comment containing a dubious statement.

[philwelch]

Keep in mind, that was during a much more civil era at HN, and at a time when vote totals were actually displayed. Back then, I downvoted lots of posts I disagreed with because I thought they were worth 10 points instead of 11, but I wouldn't downvote one with 1 point because it clearly wasn't worth 0. The site and culture have changed, and it's silly cargo-culting to just go by old pg quotes that speak to a totally different era of HN.

[tokenadult]

The site and culture have changed, and it's silly cargo-culting to just go by old pg quotes that speak to a totally different era of HN.

I appreciate your reply. (Yeah, I upvoted it.) If someone had found a newer quotation on the same issue, I'd refer to that whenever this frequently asked question comes up. To the main point, there is no rule here either in the explicit guidelines

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

or in the established custom of the site that a downvote mandatorily must be accompanied by a reply, nor is there any rule or custom that downvotes are solely to be applied to the kind of comments that pg has described

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696

as "comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted." The question is a question of line-drawing. I try on my part to make my upvotes far outnumber my downvotes, and I try actively to upvote any comment that made me think of an aspect of a problem I haven't thought about before or that cites information I haven't learned before. I lurk in a lot of threads just to upvote good stuff. But some comments mostly just try to express poorly thought out opinions with little factual basis or to make lame jokes, and there is no particular reason to explain downvoting those comments. I don't always claim that comments that I downvote are from "trolls/rude people"; sometimes they are just comments that don't meet the usual high standards of regular participants here.

[heretohelp]

Said better than I could've.

Thank you.