I realized that the HN Guidelines page does not talk about downvotes. I want to solicit some community-wide consensus on when downvoting a comment is appropriate. I'd like to broadly categorize comments into several types, arranged in order of appropriateness to use downvotes:
1. Anything that's not constructive or not in good faith. Trolls, personal attacks, etc.
2. Anything that's interesting but off topic.
3. Anything that's relevant and interesting, but the comment has factual errors.
4. Anything that's relevant and interesting, but primarily opinion-based and you disagree with that opinion.
I noticed that I sometimes perhaps downvote a little too much. Perhaps we should standardize on only downvoting 1,2,3 but not 4? Or perhaps we do want to downvote all four, or only the first two? Any thoughts?
Some people cited "low value" comments as being a good reason for downvoting them. Others said "comments I don't like/disagree with." A few said they never downvote other comments ("I never downvote anything anywhere ever. I don't understand how can downvoting make any constructive sense.")
> Things pg said about downvotes:
> >>117171
> >>392347
> >>658691
> It's how HN has always worked, and in my opinion needs to. A site that cares about discussion quality needs those white blood cells.
And as for the guidelines talking about voting:
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.