Why can't we upvote in the lounge? This is awesome.

I think the original intent was to not allow any down votes, so you could speak you mind. But I wish there were only upvotes. Some of my favorite responses are in the lounge. Don't let people down-vote you, but up-votes should be allowed.

yeah, or the whole thing of people risking random downvotes based on opinion, since in a "general" area there are likely to be lots of random things for people to have opinions about, so no voting makes it comparably safer.

then again, not being very good at writing and/or having little interesting or relevant to say probably doesn't help sometimes.

like, some amount of "if you don't have anything particularly relevant to say and the core question has already been sufficiently answered, don't say anything".

or one answers a question or similar, gets a mix of downvotes and upvotes, usually ending up at 0, ...

alas...