That's what the interpretation should be. But because of a comment Paul Graham wrote ~8 years ago, people think they can downvote just if they disagree.
Anyway, we're not allowed to talk about downvoting because it's against the rules. It's the great HN Catch 22.
The pretext of the discussion of what sorts of downvotes are okay is that someone is watching and is going to do something about it.
That seems like it might happen in egregious cases, but I'm not sure why people think someone is going to spend a couple of minutes analyzing whether the 4 down clicks on their tossaway comment were fair minded (whatever that means) or not.
So the problem isn't just that it's a boring discussion, it's also just not a reasonable expectation that every single click be fair (whatever that means).
