The reason it is annoying is that 5 hours later some HN readers who actually understood your comment have upvoted your post to 4.

Now your complaint is sticking around completely redundantly and this whole thread is taking up a lot of screen real-estate.

all right, point taken. and dare i say, lesson learned.

however, it does represent, at least to me, a flaw in the whole HN voting system; given that user privileges are tied to karma points, i feel that upvotes should be allowed as they are now, but downvotes __must__ require some form of response from the downvoter(s) as to why they are downvoting anything ( a la /. ). you don't need to write a paragraph explaining why you downvoted anything, but you should be required to pick at least __one__ response tag that classifies your reason for downvoting (wrong, inflammatory, trollish or whatever).

anyways, sorry for taking up screen real estate with all this unneeded c.r.a.p. i better get back to "real life"[TM] and soon!