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Earlier today I have downvoted this answer and left a comment explaining my action. It was something like this:

-1 because this is an unreadable 5 lines long run of words with no formatting or punctuation. Please [edit] your answer to improve it and I'll retract my downvote.

It's a good practice to explain your downvotes, the website will even nudge you with tooltips if you downvote without commenting too much. I've also added the second sentence to explain how voting and edits work here because answer's OP is a low-rep low-activity user.

Now my comment is gone. What was the reason for removing it?

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I removed it, though I was a little wary.

While your comment described exactly what should be done it was a little harsh and apparently taken badly by the other party who replied with

omg someones salty

In this case it seems that it was taken as a downvote particularly because it was a competing answer rather than a constructive comment and was just likely to be taken badly.

Adjusting the tone of your comment can go a long way to stopping that kind of negative reception. Rather than emphasising the bad in the answer you could highlight how it could be improved instead. Saying "-1" is particularly negative. Something like

It looks like you are new here and may not have seen our editing tools. You might want to reformat your answer to break it up and improve it to increase the chances of upvotes. You can easily [edit] your answer using the link below the body.

Don't beat people with sticks, guide them with carrots.

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  • Got it. I'll try to be more careful with my wording when leaving such comments.
    – gronostaj
    Jun 4, 2020 at 12:13

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