<i>The overall goal here is not to make any one person feel like a special snowflake</i><p>If I understood the OP, their issue is not that they don't feel like a special snowflake - it's that this is a site that is driven, among other things, by the warm fuzziness of user contribution, predominantly expressed by voting, and that if users get the feeling that voting is irrelevant this might cause a lot of users to stop contributing.<p>While one can always say, correctly, "It's PG's site and he can do what he like with it", I think it is fair to comment on things like "if my vote doesn't count, showing me the button regardless and eliciting my vote seems unfair". If The Great Algorithm In The Sky has decided my vote doesn't count, I think it is fair to indicate this to me in some way.<p>My comment average is 4.24 right now so I am presumably not affected - who knows?, but I sympathise with the essence of the OP's argument. I also sympathise with PG's attempts to maintain the integrity of the site in the face of increasing popularity. I think the issue is not the why, it is the how.