zlacker

The great thing about the downvote feature is that is perfectly individually subjective, and thereby its affect on comments is an emergent property reflecting the subjective sentiment of the community. Perhaps more importantly, by only enabling downvotes after some period of time, new users are acclimated to the culture here (say, versus reddit), and thereby dampen culture swings.

To the OP's question, since the aggregate effect of downvoting is suppressing the visibility of a comment, I think of a downvote as my personal "delete" button.

>>gen25c+(OP)
>its affect on comments is an emergent property reflecting the subjective sentiment of the community.

Thank you for making this point - you stated it perfectly. Regardless of what you think downvotes "should be used for", the fact is that they are used to "downvote", whatever that means, and that alone is valuable.