It's bad to complain about downvotes to one's own posts, but complaining about those to others' posts is sometimes acceptable, especially in cases like this one where the post in question is so obviously correct.

Either way, it's off-topic meta noise. Nobody is going to change their voting behavior based on an admonishment, especially when the owner of the site has acknowledged that votes here are used as like/dislike.

If every time Reddit flubs a deployment we have to get one step closer to this being the case, I'd have to respectfully part ways with HN.

I think the appeal is not so much for downvotes to be reversed but for sympathetic upvotes to compensate for the downvotes?