zlacker

I generally reserve down votes for personal attacks and comments that are excessively off topic.

>>ratsma+(OP)
That's fine, but it's not a norm here. HN explicitly allows downvoting disagreement; a downvote is less noisy and disruptive than the "I disagree with this" comments that we'd get if you couldn't.

>>ratsma+(OP)
I tend to downvote lazy arguments or loaded questions which can be easily answered in 10 seconds by looking them up and have regularly appeared on HN, devoid of new content.

It's fine not to know something, but the threshold to comment should be slightly higher than that; a quick Internet search shouldn't already answer your question / remark.

If I'm not careful I start writing an answer to these, only to realize that I've already done so for the same remark several times already. At that point I just dismiss my comment and downvote instead.

I think we're kind of missing a HN FAQ which we could assume is common knowledge. Obviously I'm talking about technical topic where there is a clear answer.