Sometimes people complain about comments getting downvoted out of disagreement, even though they contribute to the discussion. But I am far more bothered by the inverse problem: comments that get upvoted out of shallow agreement even though they serve no purpose, focusing on some negligibly relevant detail in a haughty way. These comments make it harder to participate in the conversation for fear of people latching on to completely irrelevant details and drowning out the message.

In short: Upvotes correlate with good comments, but they also correlate with certain types of poisonous comment.

As to continuing tangents, I would have been quite happy to see both of our comments dug into invisible gray together. But even if that fails I'm happy to provide a bright warning against being reactionary, and to hope that any wasted space is meta at worst.