Some comments convey such a lack of goodwill that it would be a waste of anyone's time to explain to the author of that comment why it was worth downvoting. Us

Some comments convey such a lack of goodwill that it would be a waste of anyone's time to explain to the author of that comment why it was worth downvoting. Usually, if a comment hits a critical mass of several violations of the spirit of the conduct desired here on HN, I'll downvote and move on. If you think of what would happen as a group if someone say, posted a flame-bait comment, and then everyone who wanted to downvote it had to leave a comment _engaging_ with the flame bait: then you've given oxygen to that fire. It's most prudent to instead not engage and send a simple signal to the commenter "this comment was not well received". It avoids creating a dogpile of people scolding that commenter or spiraling into deeply nested argumentative threads devoid of curiosity.