I agree with @dahart.

The political threads were a special beast, where any comment that revealed your political leanings would get a deluge of downvotes from the opposition. The Tesla and Apple threads sometimes get a bit of this too. But the vast majority of my experience is that the downvotes I've received were well-deserved. Maybe I was just misinformed and propagating misinformation. Maybe I was trying and failing to be funny - and thus didn't contribute to the conversation or cultivate curiosity.

Low effort / incorrect comments don't bother me a great deal. Usually someone else comes along and downvotes those. If it's a thoughtful comment that I disagree with, I'll attempt to engage, if I think there's some value in putting the effort in.

With experience, you do get a feel for when comments just are not worth bothering with. If they are low effort / failing to contribute, downvote and move on with your life.

A community is very much the sum of the contributors, with spirit that stems from the guidelines and moderation. Without individuals putting something in, something more than what detractors try to take away, it couldn't exist and thrive.

So like I think this is kind the authors point. Downvote isn't going to solve everything but it is a tool that let people signal to one another of something being a miss. You can have spammers that downvote everything but like thats also detectable and can signal biases. In response to spammers, there is away to cancel out those biases with upvotes. And if there are spammers on both sides you'd expect to arrive close to 50/50 in which case that signals something to a read. If its 80% negative that also signals maybe we should understand why this is bad or why its to be avoided. However without a balancing force whats the difference of +50 and +1000? Both are positive even if the +1000 has 1000s of negative comments not everyone has the time to engage on a topic completely and +/- give a quick way to understand the content that should be engaged with on a deeper level because it is divisive. Without the tool not only would you never know the difference but you can never know the difference without engaging every topic at max effort which no person can do

I feel you on this. I rarely post online because there's about a 50% chance I'll run into hostile replies written in bad faith. Also, as I've gotten older, I've gradually grown into the realization that I don't need to justify my opinions to Internet randos. :)

(Even writing this I worry someone's going to tell me this is wrong somehow, but the objective function for my value of time has become very ruthless.)

32 minutes in and this has enough downvotes to be greyed out.

Way to prove his point internet rando's.

I can't downvote and don't care to, but have an upvote on me for expressing a valid opinion, which was proven true in less than an hour.

One problem on HN is, that downvotes aren't limited to the comment but include the commenter.

This is a reliable way to identify low value contributions this is less of an issue in a relatively small environment like hacker news where you can in most threads without grave difficulty read all the comments and every story on the front page if you like.

In larger scoped things you will have much more content than anyone could possibly consume and most of it is bad. Keeping score is a way of avoiding everyone having to go through the same pile of drek. Keeping score is only half as effective if you can only up vote. Consider two tallies of several contributions. First two bad contribution neither sufficiently bad to be worthy of being banned.

Contribution A: Imagine 100 people viewed, 10 people liked it, 70 people hated it 20 were indifferent.

With down votes: -60 Without: 10

Contribution B: 10 people liked it, 10 hated it, 80 indifferent.

With down votes: 0 Without: 10

Now consider a positive contribution C with fewer votes 10 for and 1 against.

With down votes: 9 Without: 10

Now something outrageous that attracted a ton of engagement based on how bad it is. Maybe they said we should raise corgis and kitties as meat animals! 980 votes to the negative and 20 to the positive.

With down votes: -960 without: 20

Without down votes A B and C are identically scored despite B being worse than C and A being much worse. Even worse D despite being horrible is scored the highest!

Not applying the karma of a comment to the commenter has similar downsides. You would be throwing away good useful information your users have given you.

That's a feature, not a bug.