For future reference I always downvote nodes about XP.

I don't always downvote all XP-related nodes, but I do fairly consistently downvote nodes that complain about various aspects of the XP system, nodes that complain about people's voting behavior, and the like, especially if the complaints are fundamentally silly and the suggested changes are pointless. Is there *anybody* who really wants to see a bunch of nodes that just say, essentially, "I disagree", so that the person posting it can -- the thing?

I downvote such nodes because they add nothing of value to the community, and I'm tired of reading the same old complaints over and over and over and over and over and over again. I usually don't add another comment, either, and almost didn't this time, because I'm tired of being dragged into the same argument again and again and again, the argument where I say "complaining doesn't help your XP *or* your Perl competency, discuss something useful instead" and the complainer completely ignores any reasoning I might provide and either continues to complain, or goes off on some inane and bogus tangent about how without complaining nothing would ever get fixed. I don't want to have that conversation again.

If the person doing the downvoting feels that explaining what is wrong with the node will benefit anyone, then he's free to explain it. I personally don't generally bother to downvote a node if I'm going to reply, because I feel that in such cases my reply can be more instructive than the downvote. Put another way, if the node is good enough to warrant an explanation, then it's often too good to downvote. For instance, I usually don't downvote nodes that make incorrect statements about how some feature of the Perl language works; if someone hasn't already done so, I reply and correct them; if someone has, I upvote the correction. This is useful because it helps people to understand Perl better. At the other end of the scale, if the original node is just trolling (e.g., "Perl sucks because it's unreadable and slow, we should all use C instead"), a reply would actively aggravate the matter ("feeding" the troll, as it were) and a simple downvote is better. Complaints about XP are somewhere in between, but I tend to think they're closer to the troll than the factual error.