Please stop going on about downvoting. The guidelines specifically ask you not to.

I feel the same, actually. I'm a Marxist. I often get downvoted for mentioning something about socialism or social justice in general. I believe many of those downvotes are because the community here is not particularly fond of that ideology.

I get it. I'm not particularly fond of lots of ideologies. But I don't have tools here to differentiate between, "I disagree" and "Your comment is structurally bad (rude/breaks the rules/is low effort/etc."

I think we'd both benefit from breaking the coupling between those two reasons to downvote. (And yes, I'm aware that downvoting because you disagree is against the rules, but I don't think that stops anyone. :D )

Downvoting because of disagreement is specifically allowed here, and pretty much always has been.

You know, I could have sworn I read in the guidelines somewhere that downvotes aren't to be used just to signal that you disagree, but in diving a bit deeper I think that's just one of those things that people say, but doesn't actually ground to any specific rules/guidelines.

And in fact, an early post says the opposite -- downvoting because you disagree is fine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

You might be thinking of the Reddit guidelines, where this rule is famously never observed.