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I wrote a long comment and someone took the "strong downvote, no disagreement, no reply" tack again. Poppy-cutters[1] seem way more common at LessWrong than I could've predicted, and I'd like to see statistics to see how common they are, and to see whether my experience here is normal or not.
Meaning users who just seem to want to make others feel bad about their opinion, especially unconstructively. Interesting statistics might include the distributions of users who strong-downvote a positive score into a negative one (as compared to their other voting behaviors), who downvote more than they disagree, who downvote more than they upvote, who strong-downvote more than they downvote, and/or strong-downvote more often than they reply. Also: is there an 80/20 rule like "20% of the people do 80% of the downvotes"? Is the distribution different for "power users" than "casual users"?
Disagree votes are meant to be a way to signal disagreement without signaling that the comment was lower quality/signal.
I don't think the disagreement of a single LW reader is something to feel sad about. I would feel sad if nobody ever disagreed with my comments.
Yikes! Apparently I said "strong disagree" when I meant "strong downvote". Fixed. Sorry. Disagree votes generally don't bother me either, they just make me curious what the disagreer disagrees about.
Oh, that'd be nice - hide it for maybe 6 hours or until there are 4 voters, whichever comes first. That lets solid signals come through quickly, and weak ones settle a bit before hitting.