Does that spice go bad if it turns gray?

"this"

Eh, I can understand both sides of the fence. 'this is why I read HN' is nothing but a slightly more verbal '+1', but as you stated it does humanize HN and makes it feel more social.

In terms of downvotes, what really irks me and what I often see is people posting factually correct information, but still being sent into faded oblivion because some sect of the community's worldview doesn't agree with the facts.

I don't understand this viewpoint. Information being factually correct is a low bar. I have a lot of factually correct information that is irrelevant or misleading, or that I could state in a way that drags down the level of discourse more than it illuminates truth. Factually correct information is usually involved in tu quoque fallacies, or used to goad people into drawing false, non-sequitur conclusions. The Hacker News guidelines lay out a list of expectations for comments that go beyond factual correctness.

If someone uses factually correct information to make a comment thread worse, I can see how downvotes could be justified.

The fact (heh) that people instantly rammed the downvote button to get what I said to -2 ironically proves my point. Oh well.