Hi OzBargain mods/fellow members.
I would like to propose the following change to the Negative voting comment.
Rather than the criteria of "If user has made a comment", "then allow negative vote".
Perhaps when someone presses the neg button, there would be a field that says "Please tag your comment in this page as justification", or "Please enter your justification for a negative vote", just like how the report button works. A little reminder of examples of justification comments would be next to it (rephrase the negative voting guidelines), with a tick of "By ticking this box, I have read the negative voting rules, and my justification comment complies with this" (you could leave this permanently ticked for people)
Also a penalty of "inappropriate use of negative vote" will revoke your negative voting rights for X amount of time would be a good deterrent.
With this, either an existing comment made or the entered comment will be tagged with "Negative Vote Justification" similar to the Associated/Employee tag.
The story behind this is when there's many comments in a deal, especially ones that have had bad experiences in the past, there's many neg votes that have either one or multiple comments.
The main problem is there are secondary comments that follow the words of I agree with you, with nothing else, and that's the only comment a negative voter would have in that particular deal.
Food for thought!
It's there already. :)