Someone mentioned downvoting. I think having downvotes on any website is just asking for trouble. It's not like pinball is a crucial matter, so why ask for drama? Besides, since when do people need feedback to every dang thing they say? Since when do people need to give feedback to others in a nonverbal way (er, a non-text way)? Only when websites started doing the up/downvote concept, that's when. It's done to pull in people, to get them more involved, which serves the website, yet we see the deleterious side effects, don't we? You wonder how did people cope prior to this. It's better to get rid of comment voting and make people who are involved enough in the topic to comment in a new post. If they are too lazy or indifferent to comment, all the better that we do not see their vote. Consider the IPDB ratings system, for example. Many people ignore the actual ratings as farcical and instead find value in the comments left there. And that would be the right way to do it. Ditch the voting and go with human conversation.

Ok, you are using it in an encoded way to indicate you have replied to the post. Ok. But, just for the sake of friendly discussion, if that tech's post is on page 3 and your corrective response is on page 388 (not uncommon here) because you went ahead and posted your corrective reply because you yourself didn't want to wade through all of those pages to see if someone else already caught the tech's error(s), well I bet a reader on page 3 who "might" notice your downvote may not "hear" your implied message that somewhere in those next 385 pages is your useful correction. I suggest it's better (and doable) for the webmaster to have a clickable place in each comment to pull up a thread of replies to said comment so we do not have to rely on the uncertainty of creative users who informally use the downvote for that purpose. Then, one less reason for that downvote feature.

Well, ok. But, me, if someone else has posted and made my point, I don't need to weigh in to.. do what.. just to make people see that I had the same point? I guess I do not see who would ever care that you voted to avoid an argument. Why not just do nothing? It would just be my ego making me redundantly vote, not a belief that anybody cared to see it. Also, if I had more to say, a downvote would be inadequate and I would simply post what I had to say. Like I'm doing now. Have you noticed I did not downvote your comments? Downvoting is pointless to me and apparently induces ill will to the nice but susceptible folks among us. I guess I just don't see the upside of that.

For those people reading this and who VOTE reduntantly (as you put it) in lieu of COMMENTING reduntantly, what drives you or anyone to feel you need to weigh in redundantly at all? Myself, I don't need a volume of yes or noes for anything I say here. I prefer intellectual discussion. As far as offering my opinions, is my opinion so shaky and volatile that it really matters how many downvotes I get? No. Do I really lookup each downvote to see whose anonymous username-and-photo disagreed? That's silly. So, I don't care how people vote and that's why I can't grasp why other people care about that as a meaningful substitute for text. And if someone doesn't want to type out a comment that's already been typed out, well who needs to read a duplicate comment anyway, am I right? Duplicate comments and all voting are all extraneous to me. I see voting as useless stuff that causes problems. But I already said that, didn't I? LOL.