Because with such a small community, the down-vote button shouldn't be used to hide anything we disagree with (in fact, I upvote comment I don't agree with yet can find no fault in; it leads to diverse discussions) but only to hide outright rude and useless comments.
If you down-voted everything you disliked, you'd get an annoying echo chamber. Sure, that was okay in Reddit; it's so immense you're bound to find pockets of diverse discussion there, but with such small numbers here, you'd would crush out any differing opinions.
All that being said, I don't mind the occasional down-vote. But when a comment gets a flood of down-votes for expressing a differing opinion, that's when I get testy.
Because with such a small community, the down-vote button shouldn't be used to hide anything we disagree with (in fact, I upvote comment I don't agree with yet can find no fault in; it leads to diverse discussions) but only to hide outright rude and useless comments.
If you down-voted everything you disliked, you'd get an annoying echo chamber. Sure, that was okay in Reddit; it's so immense you're bound to find pockets of diverse discussion there, but with such small numbers here, you'd would crush out any differing opinions.
All that being said, I don't mind the occasional down-vote. But when a comment gets a flood of down-votes for expressing a differing opinion, that's when I get testy.