You can turn on "show dead" in your profile to see what kind of dreck gets filtered out. You can also vouch for a comment if it's unfairly been downvoted.
Ironically, I don't think that's correct. HN is good because the signal-to-noise is very high, and comments that violate guidelines or otherwise don't meet community standards get downvoted. While contrarian opinions may get caught up in that, the goal is not to suppress "misinformation" which is mostly only a pretend political problem anyway. On forums like this, even the strawman of "the average person isn't smart enough to be allowed to think for themselves" which is used to justify censoring bigger platforms doesn't apply. People can easily make up their own minds.
Downvoting is about community standards, not misinformation policing.
Obviously if someone is just plain wrong about something they should be corrected and not downvoted for it, but when someone posts misinformation it's nice that it can be downvoted out of sight fast enough that it's gone before many people are exposed to it and before a bunch of people have spent their time posting facts/corrections or providing critical context for the benefit of others.
We'll likely just have to agree to disagree on misinformation being a "pretend" problem, and it's understandable if your perspective means you don't consider the downvote's utility in fighting against misinformation important, but I'm glad for it.
How can you tell the difference between someone being plain wrong and misinformation? Are they not one in the same?
The dictionary definition seems to include deliberate misinformation for deceptive purposes, but I might call that "disinformation" instead.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
My personal observation is that "downvote to oblivion" seems to facilitate upvote/downvote wars where one side tries to downvote its opposition to oblivion rather than letting it just sink on its own.
In practice downvoting seems to largely be a "dislike" button. Personally I'd prefer if it were eliminated or at least sliced by category such as spam, trolling, or flamebait. I'm not even sure that off-topic posts should be downvoted - I would expect other posts to naturally rise above them in most cases.