A lot of the comments below engage in back-and-forth (up-and-down?) about whether or not it is permitted to use downvotes to indicate disagreement. Pretty much every time long-time users of Hacker News participate in a discussion on this issue, someone remembers to bring up pg's comment in an early thread from 1608 days ago.
"I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness."
If you check the currently posted site guidelines,
asked, "How to stave off decline of HN?" He wrote, "The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted."
So at that time, he thought that a significant subset of comments was getting too many upvotes (and, by implication, too few downvotes). That led to a software change such that users can no longer see the net comment karma totals of other user's comments. (You and I can still see the individual net karma totals for each of our own comments.)
To sum up, what I really like to do is upvote good comments. But there is no rule against downvoting a comment if it is mean (definitely not), nor is there a rule against downvoting a comment if it is dumb (the trick is perceiving whether or not a comment is dumb), and especially there is no rule against downvoting a comment if it is both mean and dumb. And if a comment is just a snarky remark that doesn't advance the discussion, or a lame attempt at a one-liner joke, or otherwise doesn't add value to the discussion, it doesn't harm the community to downvote such a comment without further reply.
(They're not really logical opposites and their use frequency is quite different.)
I'm happy to upvote more than downvote. I get the sense that some of the best stuff here on Hacker News still isn't upvoted enough.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
"I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness."
If you check the currently posted site guidelines,
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
the only guidelines you see about downvoting occur right at the end:
"Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
"Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you."
A thread opened by pg 466 days ago
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696
asked, "How to stave off decline of HN?" He wrote, "The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted."
So at that time, he thought that a significant subset of comments was getting too many upvotes (and, by implication, too few downvotes). That led to a software change such that users can no longer see the net comment karma totals of other user's comments. (You and I can still see the individual net karma totals for each of our own comments.)
To sum up, what I really like to do is upvote good comments. But there is no rule against downvoting a comment if it is mean (definitely not), nor is there a rule against downvoting a comment if it is dumb (the trick is perceiving whether or not a comment is dumb), and especially there is no rule against downvoting a comment if it is both mean and dumb. And if a comment is just a snarky remark that doesn't advance the discussion, or a lame attempt at a one-liner joke, or otherwise doesn't add value to the discussion, it doesn't harm the community to downvote such a comment without further reply.
(They're not really logical opposites and their use frequency is quite different.)
I'm happy to upvote more than downvote. I get the sense that some of the best stuff here on Hacker News still isn't upvoted enough.