&gt; PS: it&#x27;s pretty bad form to down-vote because you don&#x27;t agree with opinion.<p>Ignore single downvotes; they&#x27;re often mistakes and usually corrected.<p>Also:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=658683" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=658683</a><p>&gt; IIRC we first had this conversation about a month after launch. Downvotes have always been used to express disagreement. Or more precisely, a negative score has: users seem not to downvote something they disagree with if it already has a sufficiently negative score.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=117171" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=117171</a><p>&gt; I think it&#x27;s ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren&#x27;t only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren&#x27;t only for booing rudeness.<p>&gt; It only becomes abuse when people resort to karma bombing: downvoting a lot of comments by one user without reading them in order to subtract maximum karma. Fortunately we now have several levels of software to protect against that.<p>There&#x27;s another one from pg saying the same, but I can&#x27;t find it at the moment.<p>But he did also say this:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=1057347" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=1057347</a><p>&gt; My plan for dealing with downvoting is just not to display points on comments any more. The hard part is that to make that work, I also have to come up with alternative ways for people to find the comments they&#x27;re most interested in on big threads.<p>I agree that people should avoid downvoting for disagreement, but it&#x27;s probably more important to avoid accusing someone else of downvoting you for disagreement.