Comment by hkmurakami
10 years ago
I voted for Pinboard but did not downvote your post (it would be wrong for me to have done so).
While the upvotes are an indication of support for your position, it wouldn't have accurately captured the number of people who disagreed with you (and thus supported Pinboard), since disagreement is not grounds for downvoting.
According to Paul Graham, it's acceptable to downvote for disagreement. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
It's true but I'm in same boat as parent: I only downvote on spam, hate comments, etc. Downvoting can make comments disappear and sort of censor aspects of a discussion. Even bad claims are often misconceptions worth addressing with comments and evidence instead of downvoting for other readers' benefit. So, I almost never downvote.
I'm sure there's others given I know specific people's position on comments I made that they could've downvoted. So, parent's claim stands but we can't know how much. Maybe worth considering modifying downvote concept to deal with this somehow in another forum as an experiment.
My view is that there is a ton of noise of HN, and HN has this problem where threads devolve into tangents/pedantry/really nitpicky arguments where people start arguing over little logical details. And rather than just go down the rabbit hole of this morass of noise, I'd rather just downvote.
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