I can’t say I never downvote anyone but I get into these comment chains from time to time where really no matter what I post whoever I’m talking to downvotes every response but I generally shy away from downvoting even things I dislike. I don’t want to fall into an echo chamber where all I see are only the things I agree with.
Yeah like the example you gave is a good example of someone being off topic. It’s just that I don’t see that circumstance very often personally. More so i have personally seen it used in a disagreement type way, like a single sentence will be taken out of a comment and used to say the whole comment is off topic when I personally didn’t feel they were as egregiously off topic like in the example you gave. So in that sense it seems subjective… that person felt the other was off topic, I as a third party subjectivity didn’t agree