Oh don't get your panties all in a bunch. I take it as a personal statement not as a representative of YDN. I've sent a counter email to YDN that I wasn't really all that offended.

I don't think you understand the "be civil" part of the guidelines.

You asked a question, got a civil answer and responded really rather rudely.

At first I thought this elblanco guy was a bit whiny as well, but now I'm starting to see the pattern of bad behavior behind his point.

After your response (and a few others), I think he is perfectly valid.

If my karma were high enough, I would certainly downvote...nay flag your comment as a clear violation of guidelines.

> It seems to me that someone thin-skinned enough to cease posting his opinions because his comments get downvoted (rather than reconsidering how he comments and seeing if he can improve how he comments) might be just as discouraged from posting minority opinions if he sees a lot of replies that disagree with him.

I respectfully disagree. A downmod supplies almost zero feedback to the recipient. Many posts I've seen with negative mod scores are complex and have a number of topics in them. A downvote at no time explains what precisely was wrong with the post.

It's like a presidential candidate not getting a vote, he doesn't know what part of his platform lost him the vote, just that he didn't get it.

In real life a candidate can pay for a poll and find out why, here it seems that asking why immediately results in more downmods.

(I admit the analogy is imperfect, but hopefully you see where I'm trying to go with it).

The flag mechanism already exists to deal with true trash if I'm not mistaken.

It seems to me, respectfully, that using the downvote to try and clean the community is like a small-town sheriff trying to keep the perceived riff-raff of city-slickers, with their strange ways and funny hair, out of his community.

Maybe only downmods force a user to "spend" karma? This would weed out habitual downmodders.

This is not a bad idea. Force a person to spend some karma to take somebody else's karma away. It's similar to how and upvoting commenting seems to help build karma here.

And meta-comment, really? Your post was downvoted? Way to discourage ideas and effort....sigh

I don't think you're right. The reasons seem to be that people are downmodding as a social normalization function. It's like saying "don't post more like that please".

I think you are taking downmods a bit too personally.

Well, different people are having different takes on the semantics I guess. How about a quota though? Nobody likes an overly negative person at a party. IRL, we can't enforce good behavior that way, but here we can through the power of software.

I don't think a quota makes sense. But a comment/vote does.

I don't want to limit the amount of times a person can disagree with me (at risk of allowing for disagreeable persons).

After following this topic for a while, it seems that the main problem is objection to comment-less downmods, not downmods in principle.

Precisely.