Explanation's not needed because, in general, it's simple. You got modded down because what you said was interpreted as contributing nothing. How can you say something and contribute nothing? There's many ways:
- Trolling (examples: "you're clearly a mac fanboy", "you want fries with that?")
- Be trite or redundant (examples: "lol", "i agree", "+1 interesting", "upmod parent")
- Personal attacks (examples: "I bet if you were him you'd say 'go away customer, I only write my software in Rails/LISP/Haskell'")
- Poor attitude (examples: "shut the f*ck up", "that's dumb")
- Being incoherent, in jest or in seriousness (examples: "mahler called, he wants his symphony back")
- Rambling on without saying anything (examples: "then i went to see my dentist, but that's a whole another story...")
- And, last but not least, disagreement. Theoretically, you will not be downmodded for saying something disagreeable. In practice, however, downmodding on disagreement does happen. Some misuse is to be expected, and all we can do is live with that.
You got modded down because what you said was interpreted as contributing nothing.
Not necessarily. Sometimes downmods are because while the post is good, it's not 100-points-good. And of course, I'm sure everyone has downmodded a comment because you disagreed, not because the comment was bad. (The lack of a downmod button on replies is a great idea. I am always in the habit of dowmodding disagreeing responses on reddit. Just because I can.)
I don't know if you are trying to be funny, but downmod'ing a comment because you disagree with it is not acceptable.
Modding should only be used to improve a discussion, and in a discussion it is very common that people have different ideas. So when you downmod a comment, you are actually trying to remove it from the discussion and therefore damaging the discussion.
> - Being incoherent, in jest or in seriousness (examples: "mahler called, he wants his symphony back")
Brilliant, sir.
I think a lot of people go beyond that--I haven't paid much attention here, but I know on reddit people will downmod anything they don't agree with like crazy.
[edit] just saw that someone else wrote the exact same thing; my bad.
That's the reason downvoting didn't exist here at first. PG is aware of the problem of using downmodding to convey disagreement (and he's all too familiar with reddit.) But, eventually, he wound up adding it in anyway, to control overall post quality. You can't downmod unless your karma meets a certain threshold, which means you've been in the community long enough to learn not to downmod on disagreement.
As the community grows, however, reaching that low threshold may become easier and easier, so people less involved in the community suddenly get the same power before they know how to properly use it.
To fix this, the threshold should grow with the size of the community. For instance, instead of a static "50-100" points threshold, maybe it should be a dynamic question, such as, "is his karma in the top 70% of the population?"
- Trolling (examples: "you're clearly a mac fanboy", "you want fries with that?")
- Be trite or redundant (examples: "lol", "i agree", "+1 interesting", "upmod parent")
- Personal attacks (examples: "I bet if you were him you'd say 'go away customer, I only write my software in Rails/LISP/Haskell'")
- Poor attitude (examples: "shut the f*ck up", "that's dumb")
- Being incoherent, in jest or in seriousness (examples: "mahler called, he wants his symphony back")
- Rambling on without saying anything (examples: "then i went to see my dentist, but that's a whole another story...")
- And, last but not least, disagreement. Theoretically, you will not be downmodded for saying something disagreeable. In practice, however, downmodding on disagreement does happen. Some misuse is to be expected, and all we can do is live with that.