The mere existence of the "downvote" mechanism is social and emotional poison.
It's like you're sitting around a table chatting with friends, and everyone has their hands under the table, with an annoying buzzer in one hand and a friendly chime in the other hand. And everyone is chatting politely, and then people realize that they can give "anonymous feedback" by pressing the annoying buzzer when they don't like what someone just said, and the chime when they approve of what someone just said.
But as soon as people start to do this, it is clear that, whatever the intention, the only possible actual outcome is noise. You say something and receive two chimes and a buzzer. What does that mean? What do you do with that? Alice responds, and then Bob responds to her, except he precedes his response with a buzzer, so he might as well have preceded the whole remark with "hey, asshole!" even though his comment would have been perfectly constructive without the buzzer.
Basically my point is the buzzer ruins everything. If you went to a party and people were using these buzzers you would leave.
The downvote option does make it easier to be negative, but it also gives people an option in between ignoring trolls (and risking people thinking that other people don't have a problem with them) and engaging them (and rewarding them). It also lets people express disapproval of a post without wasting another post saying nothing but "I disagree". Of course, people still do downvote and then also post a comment that has no semantic content other than "I don't like you".
At a party, there are all sorts of feedback: smiles, laughs, nods, frowns, awkward silences, glares, etc. The upvote/downvote is a rough analog of that.
To whoever has for the last several days been downvoting ~10 of my old comments per day:
It is possible that your intention is to discourage me from commenting on Less Wrong.
The actual effect is the reverse. My comments still end up positive on average, and I am therefore motivated to post more of them in order to compensate for the steady karma drain you are causing.
If you are mass-downvoting other people, the effect on some of them is probably the same.
To the LW admins, if any are reading:
Look, can we really not do anything about this behaviour? It's childish and stupid, and it makes the karma system less useful (e.g., for comment-sorting), and it gives bad actors a disproportionate influence on Less Wrong. It seems like there are lots of obvious things that would go some way towards helping, many of which have been discussed in past threads about this.
Failing that, can we at least agree that it's bad behaviour and that it would be good in principle to stop it or make it more visible and/or inconvenient?
Failing that, can we at least have an official statement from an LW administrator that mass-downvoting is not considered an undesirable behaviour here? I really hope this isn't the opinion of the LW admins, but as the topic has been discussed from time to time with never any admin response I've been thinking it increasingly likely that it is. If so, let's at least be honest about it.
To anyone else reading this:
If you should happen to notice that a sizeable fraction of my comments are at -1, this is probably why. (Though of course I may just have posted a bunch of silly things. I expect it happens from time to time.)
My apologies for cluttering up Discussion with this. (But not very many apologies; this sort of mass-downvoting seems to me to be one of the more toxic phenomena on Less Wrong, and I retain some small hope that eventually something may be done about it.)