"Downvoting without posting an explanation or discussion -- any sort of feedback of any length, as long as it's not grossly disrepectful (assuming the article being downvoted wasn't grossly disrespectful to begin with), is utterly without value, in my view."

In that light, upvoting without explanation is just as useless. In the case of code, was the upvote because a neat trick was done, or because of good coding style in general, just because the voter likes the votee, etc. If I post some code that has does something interesting, but the style or efficiency could you some work, but it gets more ++ than --, I'd likely continue to code in the same bass-ackwards way.

Does this mean that I should save my votes for only those nodes that are absolutely perfect or completely atrocious in every regard? No! I'm going to continue to vote as I do presently, occasionally offering additional comments, but other wise ++ or -- with no comments. If I actually have something useful to say in regards to a node, that hasn't been said by someone else, I'll offer my explanation. Since few nodes (that I know of) have replies matching their rep, negative or positive, I would assume this is at least similar what most monks do, and from the most part from what I've seen, it works.

In most cases, I can safely assume that if I post something (particularly in the Code Catacombs) and it get's no replies but has a decent rep, then it's still mediocre at best, and I should work harder on perfecting my code, but also know that at the least there wasn't anything in it bad enough to draw a mob of monks with torches.

One last note, I downvoted your node further down the parent thread (Re: [1]: Why down vote is soo easy?!), due to what I felt was your rather offensive attitude, and the conspiracy theorism didn't help much. And there's a difference between being hard, and downright mean, and if that node is in anyway representative of your idea of being hard, I would have to say, you are most definately in the camp of discouraging participation.