Why downvote? I honestly do not get it. 
DanielBMarkham: I like to scan the newcomments page to see if there is anything worth commenting on.Doing that, I noticed a long-time poster making the point that the community has changed and asking if anybody else has noticed it. So I said yes, it has changed, and quite a bit.The reward for my comment was several downvotes. As it turns out, his comment was part of some Rand thread. My comment was viewed as supportive of his position, so I was punished. Everybody who took one position was getting upvoted, and everybody who took another was getting downvoted.Now was that what really happened? Or was my comment simply empty and a pointless waste of bandwidth? I honestly don't know. All I have is up and down scores to go by. So for all of you who think the up-down arrows enforce community behavior, I have a simple question: how can the community push me to conform when I don't know if it's giving me a "we disagree" or a "poor quality" message?I know I can (and have) made the same comment in other discussions and actually got voted up, so I don't think the quality of my comment had much to do with it. It looks a lot like context and opinion matter the most to me. Probably also the time of the week and time of day.In short, the voting system is broken. A lot.