Not very compelling. First, the author finds out soon enough that it is possible "(update: Apparently it is possible to downvote comments, which I never realiz

Not very compelling. First, the author finds out soon enough that it is possible "(update: Apparently it is possible to downvote comments, which I never realized. It is buried in the faq:)" when all the premise was how it's impossible to do so, and how that's bad. Second, he says: "The advantage of this system is that nobody gets downvoted, but at a steep cost: we've lost half the potential information. If a post has zero upvotes, does that mean it's bad? incorrect? uninteresting? mediocre? There's no way to tell, because zero has multiple meanings." This is missing the fact that (even if no downvote was the case), the social aspects of this choice, and the encouraging of specific interactions and behavior, can very well be more important than getting "more information" for individual comments. Third, it presents Stack Overflow as "getting it right". Enough said.