Thanks for clarifying and stating your opinion about the quality of my comment. However, seems a bit too broad-stroke to use downvoting for both the (lack of) quality of the comment and to express disagreement.

I thought it was a comment that deserved an upvote.

But I always always downvote complaints about downvotes, such as your edit.

I do not personally have downmod capabilities, but I don't think it is necessarily too broad: If you interpret it as "People shouldn't read this", it seems reasonable.

I think equating "I disagree" with "people shouldn't read this" is problematic for a forum that wants to encourage discourse.

HN doesn't want to encourage discourse, it wants to encourage worthwhile discourse, and the distinction is significant. Consider "people shouldn't read this" as short for "Having made the mistake of wasting my time reading this, I will flag it to help others to not make the same mistake."

Revise that slightly to 'it is a waste if time to read this' maybe.

I downvote quite rarely in HN over disagreeing with someone. Usually it is when I don't feel the reply adds any value, and is actually negative for the discourse.

That is, e.g doesn't reach me anything about the opposing position, or is argumentative without any substance, but distracting from comments that are more constructive.

Of course other people use different judgement. At the same time, HN doesn't hide comments to a great extent. Even 'dead' comments are optionally visible (with the 'showdead' setting) and quite a few of us read HN with that on. It's very rare for downvotes to silence people here who aren't actively disruptive.

Couple that with first enabling downvotes when people hit a certain karma threshold, and various other limitations, and HN is free of a lot of the downvote problems of other places.

That to me makes it less of an issue if people downvote to signal disapproval here.

Often initial downvotes will be countered when people feel a comment has been downvotes too much as well.