It’s mostly up to you. The standard advice is “upvote things you want to see more of, downvote things you want to see less of”, and that’s not a bad starting point especially on the upvote side, but there’s a little more to it than that.
People respond more strongly to downvotes than upvotes, so most people don’t downvote merely low-quality posts even if they’d like to see less of them; that takes something more severe. I tend to downvote stuff if it seems to have been posted in bad faith, or if I find it rude, unreadable, obnoxious, or excessively partisan; I’ll also sometimes downvote top-level posts (not comments) if they’re poorly written or uninformative, especially in Main.
Downvoting posts because you don’t like the people that wrote them is explicitly against policy. Don’t do that. On the other hand, you’ll probably find yourself downvoting the same people a lot, and that’s fine as long as you’re basing your judgement on the posts themselves.
Incentives-wise, there’s one major caveat, and that’s that comments (but not top-level posts) downvoted below −4 can no longer be responded to without paying karma of your own, and neither can any of their children: the so-called troll toll. If you feel a comment that’s being downvoted deserves further discussion, you might not want to downvote it below that threshold even if you otherwise would.
I’ve also found it’s a good policy not to downvote responses to your own posts; it helps keep conversations civil and it helps avoid messy and unproductive downvote duels in long threads.
It’s mostly up to you. The standard advice is “upvote things you want to see more of, downvote things you want to see less of”, and that’s not a bad starting point especially on the upvote side, but there’s a little more to it than that.
People respond more strongly to downvotes than upvotes, so most people don’t downvote merely low-quality posts even if they’d like to see less of them; that takes something more severe. I tend to downvote stuff if it seems to have been posted in bad faith, or if I find it rude, unreadable, obnoxious, or excessively partisan; I’ll also sometimes downvote top-level posts (not comments) if they’re poorly written or uninformative, especially in Main.
Downvoting posts because you don’t like the people that wrote them is explicitly against policy. Don’t do that. On the other hand, you’ll probably find yourself downvoting the same people a lot, and that’s fine as long as you’re basing your judgement on the posts themselves.
Incentives-wise, there’s one major caveat, and that’s that comments (but not top-level posts) downvoted below −4 can no longer be responded to without paying karma of your own, and neither can any of their children: the so-called troll toll. If you feel a comment that’s being downvoted deserves further discussion, you might not want to downvote it below that threshold even if you otherwise would.
I’ve also found it’s a good policy not to downvote responses to your own posts; it helps keep conversations civil and it helps avoid messy and unproductive downvote duels in long threads.
I upvote responses to my own comments on principle. Unless they’re nasty, but that hasn’t happened yet on LW.