In my opinion, downvoting is necessary for forum moderation, and people don’t downvote enough. It is rather easy to get a lot of karma by simply writing a lot, because the average karma of a comment (this is just my estimate) is around 1. I would prefer if the average was closer to 0.
Asking about downvoting is ok, per se (assuming that the person does not do it with every single damned comment which fell to −1 temporarily). But sometimes it seems to contain a connotation that “you should not downvote my comments unless you explain why”. Which I completely disagree with and consider it actively harmful, so I automatically downvote any comment that feels like this. (Yes, there is a chance that I misunderstood the author’s intentions. Well, I am not omniscient, and I don’t want to get paralyzed by my lack of omniscience.)
In my opinion, downvoting is necessary for forum moderation, and people don’t downvote enough. It is rather easy to get a lot of karma by simply writing a lot, because the average karma of a comment (this is just my estimate) is around 1. I would prefer if the average was closer to 0.
Asking about downvoting is ok, per se (assuming that the person does not do it with every single damned comment which fell to −1 temporarily). But sometimes it seems to contain a connotation that “you should not downvote my comments unless you explain why”. Which I completely disagree with and consider it actively harmful, so I automatically downvote any comment that feels like this. (Yes, there is a chance that I misunderstood the author’s intentions. Well, I am not omniscient, and I don’t want to get paralyzed by my lack of omniscience.)