I've never seen an option to downvote. It could be because I don't have enough "points" in this game (130 as of the time I'm posting this) or it may be because

I've never seen an option to downvote. It could be because I don't have enough "points" in this game (130 as of the time I'm posting this) or it may be because I haven't been around long enough. Once, I did try to downvote something by kludging the "dir" variable. I was told I couldn't make that vote. What parameters must be met for a person to get downvoting ability? Enough with the goofy meta-talk, though. Since I don't have downvoting ability, I didn't even know it existed until I saw comments with zero or negative scores. Coming at it from my neophytic perspective, I am torn. At first blush, "not upvoting" and "downvoting" seem like they would serve similar functions: floating better content to the top. My only guess is that downvoting is a catalyst that makes it happen faster. The only things I've wanted to downvote if I could were trolling, spam, and tangents. To that end, I think "not relevant or contributing to the discussion" is probably the most popular reason.