[jchw]

Ultimately, I'd say it's all about trying to ensure a level playing field and trying to make sure nobody has an unfair advantage, and "unfair advantage" is always somewhat subjective. In real world sports, it often manifests in hard-to-interpret rules like F1's new-ish rules around moving under breaking. In "eSports" it manifests in many ways, like debate over what hardware and software is cheating.

> and I do think there are valid reasons to downvote without saying anything

I think people should be generally encouraged to reply. There's some comments where it's obvious why someone would disagree or take offense, but lately I've noticed that even comments that seem incredibly benign often get grayed out at least briefly. This is confusing and hard for observers to make sense of, less the poster themselves. With everything left implied, it's not even clear if people even agree on why they don't agree with the post.

Stack Overflow encourages people to explain themselves probably for the same basic reason. HN on the other hand asks commenters to not discuss votes. I do generally agree (in fact I wouldn't even really want people to start comments with "I'm down voting because...") but damnit, sometimes you just want to know why.

And of course, sometimes the reason why is someone mistapped on their mobile phone, or something like that, so you'll never know.