Do you vote on a lot of comments in a thread, or do you only vote on certain ones? If the latter, what prompts you to choose those ones in particular?
Does the concept of upvoting/downvoting/abstaining satisfy your desire to participate without always commenting? If not, what, if anything, would you change?
Unfortunately, on the internet in general, you see that all the time. Someone makes a long, interesting, and thoughtful post with a lot of ideas and content. Then someone else writes a one line criticism that picks apart 1/100th of the previous comment's content, and then everyone upvotes the correction and downvotes the original for being "wrong" on something.
Really people are just too lazy to read long posts and certainly too lazy to think about them. So a lot of people skip over them and read the first reply to see if they are worth reading. They then see the correction, upvote it as they feel as if that person "saved" them from wasting time reading the long post, and then move on (or worse downvote the original comment).
Essentially people will downvote a long comment without having ever read it and will upvote a correction without a clue how relevant it is. It literally happens all the time.
* I upvote articles that discuss something(s) I believe _everyone_ should know.
* I upvote comments that either help clarify a topic, add context, or present an interesting thought that isn't mentioned.
* I downvote comments that are blatantly disrespectful, silly, or grossly incorrect/ignorant.
[1] Parent/comment about something technical
[2] Incorrect assumption/factually wrong statement
[3] Explanation/correction
*20 points away from downvoting, but I will probably only downvote when I see comments that are 2 words or really silly / unbecoming of the community.
on another note sociology related: isn't it funny how 1 person used asterisk style bullets (markdown) and several of us followed?
* I basically never flag anything because it's not clear what "flag" means. I mean, I can make a good guess, but who knows if I understand the nuance. Is there a guideline somewhere?
* I only downvote comments that are flat-out factually wrong, or I believe are posted in bad faith.
I don't have the ability to downvote yet, but if I did I think I would mostly downvote blatant "fanboy" posts, of which I see a lot of on HN.
I'd be interested in seeing data that compared Windows/OSX/Linux users and their vote participation. Linux users strike me as the types that would be the most non-participatory, and OS X users the most participatory, with Windows users coming somewhere in the middle.