Explaining every downvote would make the signal to noise ratio worse. I vote in hopes of improving the signal to noise ratio. My replies rarely overlap with my

Explaining every downvote would make the signal to noise ratio worse. I vote in hopes of improving the signal to noise ratio. My replies rarely overlap with my downvotes. If I'm taking the time to post a counterpoint, I'm usually not going to downvote the comment I'm replying to. But if somebody is posting something that I've seen here a dozen times before, I'm not going to write the dozenth attempted refutation. That's just more noise. The rarest combination is when I flag a comment without downvoting it. That's when I agree with much of the spirit of the comment but it also contains a personal attack against another poster. Slightly less rare: I'm reading through a comment, about to upvote it, and then the final sentence turns out to be needlessly inflammatory. Or it starts out inflammatory and then makes some good points. I neither upvote nor downvote these. I don't comment on the comment style when I see these cases, because writing about style instead of the substance of the original article under discussion also worsens the SNR.