Votes mean even less than favs. Well, everyone has their own standard for how to vote or fav, there's no etiquette in that regard AFAIK.
Since there's no assurance that the people involved are voting on the same basis, inferring things from a comment's score is more or less nonsensical in nature.

A recent example, post #1540893 : NMNY's comments clarifying how female and ambiguous_gender are tagged. When this was originally linked in a recent forum thread, NMNY's comments were at 0 score. I wrote a reply to the thread and reloaded the post -- they were then at -2 score. Today, I loaded the post again and they're back at zero.

Conversely, comments that talk ignorantly about TWYS -- "should be tagged male because the artist says the character is male"; "this was intentionally mistagged" -- including a comment from the artist themselves, initially had a positive score and currently retain that positive score.

By my estimation, both of the above situations are wrong: neutrally-worded clarifications of the rules should be upvoted, and resentfully-worded obfuscation of the rules should be downvoted.

Given the scores of those comments, it should be reasonably clear that that principle isn't being wholly followed; nor is the inverse ("upvote obfuscation, downvote clarification") being wholly followed. Perhaps some other principle is being followed, but from previous discussions of voting, I'm pretty confident that it's, at best, a chaotic assortment of often arbitrary principles.

MagnusEffect said:

I'm going to assume you're mostly talking about the "I wish it were a girl" and "why does it have to be cub" styled comments on an Anubis and the Buried Bone post.
Which are both mostly just downvoted because the exclusive-sexualities traditionally don't like it when you say you wish it was the other sexuality, and people who like cub don't like it when you say anything bad about cub.
You'll notice similar things if you look into any tag that is typically avoided by people who aren't into it, though one of the easiest to notice is on any tag related to being overweight.

Can't both of these accurately be put in the 'people downvote whining' basket? They are like a lite version of the sort of "Why do people draw X?!?! " comment that often receives a 'learn to blacklist, noob' type response.