Downvoting is essentially moderating, and it costs you as much as it costs the person you downvoted. That does ensure that it's not just a blunt tool for general disagreement.

The whole site is about gamification of altruistic behavior. Answering questions is important, but pruning the unhelpful answers is too.

Are you sure that's accurate? When I downvote, I receive -1. When I get downvoted, I believe I receive -5--or, at least, something with greater magnitude than -1.

They might have changed it recently, but when I was active on SO, it was -1/-1 for downvoting, 0/+10 for upvoting. The idea was, iirc, that high-rep users have typically been active quite a while, contributed a lot of value and aren't troublemakers (or moderators would have confronted them), so they are trust-worthy to not abuse downvoting (while they could afford it). Low-rep users on the other hand can't afford to abuse downvotes (and it would take ten downvotes to undo one upvote) and have every incentive to only downvote when they do believe it's a bad answer. On the topics I was active, it was also very common to explain downvotes and flags so the users can improve their questions or answers (and downvotes would typically be removed if that happened).

Interesting idea. I'll write css rule that hides score and draw all comments with same color and see what will happen.

hn is weird in similar regards. you get downvoted and you have no idea who downvoted you and why...

Not to mention that at as a comment gets downvoted it'll turn more and more desaturated and harder to read, literally silencing someone over a disagreement.

This is one of the annoying features of HN that is unfair to the person making the comment. I, as the reader, should decide if I want to read it or not.

Agreed. Thankfully the fading goes away if you click into the comment itself (i.e. on the timestamp next to the username), but it's still annoying.

That is one of the nice things about Lobster is that down-votes do let you click on a reason.

As someone who has been quite active on SO for several years and is also new to HN I’ll definitely say that HN feels more hostile of an environment.

Even when making an honest effort to engage in meaningful discussion you might get sent to oblivion without a single reply or any sort of guidance. It feels like I’m violating unspoken community rules and no one bothers to clue you in.

HN is much easier to get started on. SO's permissions when you're first starting out are so restrictive that it's really hard to earn those first few points.

Honestly I disagree, HN seems impossible for me to gain any traction. My karma fluctuates from 0 to 10 on a daily basis essentially, and for seemingly no reason.

Example, I made a comment earlier pointing out that North Korea tends to reject outside help due to the juche methodology. That comment was at 3 points, now it sits at 0 and I really have no clue why.

At this point I don’t think I’ll see an upward trend in karma growth, not that it particularly matters.

On SO what you need to do is quite clear, on HN it’s (to me at least) a mystery

So I looked at your comment history, thinking that I would see nothing but low-quality one-liners that would explain your lack of traction. Instead, you're right --- you've got a lot of high-quality comments deserving of more upvotes!

Anyway, the secret to karma on HN is to submit interesting articles, ideally from sources that few people here are likely otherwise stumble across. While there are probably a few high scorers who get most of their points from comments, I'd bet the vast majority are from submissions.

And as the other reply to you says, don't pay too much attention to the points. Submit interesting stuff, keep making good comments, and please stick around.

Stop caring about karma, upvotes and downvotes. There's nothing you can do about the HN zeitgeist, There are no guidelines for downvoting here, and complaining about downvotes will only get you downvoted further.

Just accept that silent passive-aggressive censorship is part of the culture here and ignore it.