[rilita]

It's not useless because until you hit a certain karma value you cannot downvote. I encounter obnoxious people and attempt to respond reasonably to them; they downvote every single post I make but I obviously cannot do the same to the comments they make that are bad for the community. As a result those people gain karma for trashing whatever I say and no one else gets involved because they do not want to get involved in downvotes imo.