The site and culture have changed, and it's silly cargo-culting to just go by old pg quotes that speak to a totally different era of HN.
I appreciate your reply. (Yeah, I upvoted it.) If someone had found a newer quotation on the same issue, I'd refer to that whenever this frequently asked question comes up. To the main point, there is no rule here either in the explicit guidelines
or in the established custom of the site that a downvote mandatorily must be accompanied by a reply, nor is there any rule or custom that downvotes are solely to be applied to the kind of comments that pg has described
as "comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted." The question is a question of line-drawing. I try on my part to make my upvotes far outnumber my downvotes, and I try actively to upvote any comment that made me think of an aspect of a problem I haven't thought about before or that cites information I haven't learned before. I lurk in a lot of threads just to upvote good stuff. But some comments mostly just try to express poorly thought out opinions with little factual basis or to make lame jokes, and there is no particular reason to explain downvoting those comments. I don't always claim that comments that I downvote are from "trolls/rude people"; sometimes they are just comments that don't meet the usual high standards of regular participants here.
I appreciate your reply. (Yeah, I upvoted it.) If someone had found a newer quotation on the same issue, I'd refer to that whenever this frequently asked question comes up. To the main point, there is no rule here either in the explicit guidelines
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
or in the established custom of the site that a downvote mandatorily must be accompanied by a reply, nor is there any rule or custom that downvotes are solely to be applied to the kind of comments that pg has described
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696
as "comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted." The question is a question of line-drawing. I try on my part to make my upvotes far outnumber my downvotes, and I try actively to upvote any comment that made me think of an aspect of a problem I haven't thought about before or that cites information I haven't learned before. I lurk in a lot of threads just to upvote good stuff. But some comments mostly just try to express poorly thought out opinions with little factual basis or to make lame jokes, and there is no particular reason to explain downvoting those comments. I don't always claim that comments that I downvote are from "trolls/rude people"; sometimes they are just comments that don't meet the usual high standards of regular participants here.