Somebody voted the parent comment down without replying. Given the context, that may have been a strange joke. I voted it up.

In the present system, downvoting a comment causes fewer people to see it, since the system by default doesn't show you comments scoring below a user-settable threshhold. I like that feature.

I can't presently imagine a plausible interpretation for downvoting that yields things I'd want to downvote but still would want my peers to look at. Can you give an example?