You should only have rules that can be enforced. Having rules that people are free to break is an unnecessary corruption of the system - users and moderators know that the actual rules aren't what is written but what is enforced. People will downvote based on disagreement and there is no way to detect or punish that so why have a rule against it?

Guidelines != rules.

My point is not to have strict control, merely to get the mods to acknowledge the change in behavior from the community and review their recommendations.

I downvote for talking about downvote.

And now I wish you could downvote yourself. :p

Forums that have upvote but not downvote seem to have less acrimonious interaction. I suspect that the quality of discussion here would be improved if downvoting were completely eliminated.

I don't mind the downvotes per se. They are important to show conflict, and I wouldn't like to be coddled into a discussion forum based on silly rules like "only positive interactions allowed" . What bugs me is the mass downvoting without any proper response.

I've been saying for a while that if downvote=disagree downvote is the equivalent of replying "I disagree" or "you're wrong" and nothing else. Such a useless signal would be flagged down immediately as a comment.

Exactly. I get that that there are plenty of comments or threads that are so "wrong" that you don't want to dignify them with a response, but usually my reaction to those is to press the [-] and hide it. For the other cases, I check if there is any response already that addresses the problematic points and try to not just pile on the downvotes.

What I don't get is when I see a totally grayed out comment with a valid argument but no response whatsoever. These seem like they were just the victim of a mob attack that wanted to shut the conversation out.

Kinda ironic, this comment caught some drive by downvoting, to drag it back down to zero, but you'll notice no one has refuted me or told me why I'm wrong.

Such comments may be from a user who is shadowbanned. If you think it's a good comment, vouch for it.

Vouching implies that the comment is flagged, no? I am talking about comments that are grayed out, but not marked as flagged or dead.

Ah. Shadowbanned are dead - greyed all the way out, and they say "[dead]". That's what I thought you meant when you said "totally greyed out".

Good comments that are grey, but not dead, I tend to upvote, because they're getting jumped on for no good reason.

It instead says something else: "I do not think your comment should exist." That's in effect what it does, it makes it harder for people to read the comment's content. I feel making that explicit in the rules would be a good thing.

It's far more performative as a comment, and duplicates dilute the ability to actually read interesting comments.