Fwiw, you got an up vote from me. Your comment was out of date, not trolling. I'm really wondering if down voting needs to be removed from most people.

Oh, I'm not really worried about it. I seem to find that most people on HN, even when disagreeing, are happy to stay neutral or upvote for discussion. I suspect it's lurkers weighing in with their opinion that vote. It was pretty disheartening yesterday when a discussion turned nasty and was full of accusations that I was downvoting (and even in a place where it's impossible to downvote child comments).

I thought I'd go for a plea of sanity for those who are downvoting to consider why they're downvoting. It's so rare that I find anything worth downvoting and it's usually someone just being off the wall rude, mean or ignorant. Oh well.