> I'm actually surprised to see people here complaining about downvotes being used to disagree with comments.

It is quite common and gets really annoying after a while. Some of my comments in the past have broken the rules. Fine - downvote those. But quite a lot of them have most certainly not, and were written in all earnestness with intention of productive dialogue. And too many of those were still downvoted to a very light shade of grey within 30 minutes of being posted - without a single reply to indicate exactly what anyone's problem with such a post could possibly be, and therefore no hope of improvement (or even any real indication that improvement is needed in the first place).

When I read through threads, I see that I'm not the only one this happens to. And for the record (since this always comes up), no I don't care if they usually get voted back up eventually anyway.

I think it's the greying-out that's the worst. As though the rest of this community needs to be protected from the substance of your post, because a few randoms downvoted your post after they concluded you weren't capitalist enough, or were too capitalist, or think hip new framework X is rubbish, or that a blog post really was just poorly written and not worth reading, etc. It is a subtle aggression perpetrated by the forum software against every user here, and it contributes more to negativity than any single post ever could.

And, it's something that the mods here take special pains to totally ignore even when you bring it up in a direct reply to them discussing meta issues on the forum, multiple times over several months.

Since you're using yourself as a data point, I paged through your comment history looking for your grayed out comments. I have to say that your grayed out comments were all well deserved. They are a very small minority of your comments, but they are comments that generally involved ad hominem attacks and/or gratuitous negativity that did not add to the discussion. I would say the downvote system has worked well in these cases.

> were written in all earnestness with intention of productive dialogue.

That doesn't mean downvotes were for disagreement. Just because you intended it to contribute to productive dialogue doesn't mean that downvoters didn't think that it failed to provide a substantive contribution.

Your argument seems to recognize that people can disagree with you on your message, but seems equally to fail to recognize that people can disagree with you over whether the message was, independent of agreement or disagreement with your point, a substantive contribution.

> It is a subtle aggression perpetrated by the forum software against every user here,

Its not an aggression at all, and, if it was, it would be perpetrated by the downvoters, not the forum software. The only way it can be seen as an aggression by the software (or, more accurately, the forum operator) is if you think you have a right to be protected from seeing (or perhaps having others see) an indication of whether other members of the community think your comment is worthwhile. But that opinion is directly opposed to the entire idea of participating in a public discussion forum.

> That doesn't mean downvotes were for disagreement. Just because you intended it to contribute to productive dialogue doesn't mean that downvoters didn't think that it failed to provide a substantive contribution.

> Your argument seems to recognize that people can disagree with you on your message, but seems equally to fail to recognize that people can disagree with you over whether the message was, independent of agreement or disagreement with your point, a substantive contribution.

Perhaps you started writing your reply before I amended my post to add "without a single reply to indicate exactly what anyone's problem with such a post could possibly be". I do realize that people might not be downvoting for mere disagreement but because they think my post did not contribute to the discussion, however without a reply to elaborate on that, it isn't very helpful. The downvote alone will not usually lead to a correction in behavior, since there is no way for the receiver of the downvote to even know that the downvote was given for that reason as opposed to disagreement, much less what the reason might even be. Instead, he'll conclude that this forum is full of negative people who downvote for specious reasons, or for no reason, and perhaps begin to become a negative HN member himself. That's a loss.

And since your next objection might be that I feel entitled to a reply from everyone who downvotes a post - I don't. But less than one in ten heavily-downvoted posts that I read, has a reply to indicate why that post was downvoted. I feel that number is low.

> Its not an aggression at all, and, if it was, it would be perpetrated by the downvoters, not the forum software.

Well, I don't believe the forum software is actually capable of aggression, heh. What I was getting at, is that it is an act of aggression by the site operators against community members here. And no, I don't have a problem in general with an indication of whether the community thinks a post is worthwhile or not - I do strongly disagree with this particular implementation of it. I would have no problem with, for example, just displaying the raw upvotes and downvotes next to a post.

Like I said, it's as though readers need to be "protected" from reading your post (by making it harder to read), which is patronizing to readers and a bit harsh to the author of the post, considering all it takes is for one random to downvote your post to make it happen. If a post truly is so offensive that people probably shouldn't be made to read it (racial epithets, bullying, etc), we have flag-killing to take care of that.

Greying-out earnest comments merely because they are useless (and remember that's in the best case) is over the line because the consequence of a false positive is too high and the threshold for it to happen (again - one downvote) is too low.

> Perhaps you started writing your reply before I amended my post to add "without a single reply to indicate exactly what anyone's problem with such a post could possibly be".

It is not generally the practice to comment to explain downvotes, and, IMO -- especially given the absence of collapsed threads on HN, but even if it were present -- it would defeat the point of downvoting and decrease the signal-to-noise ratio to do so, as then meta-discussion of the problem with posts would take more real estate, at the expense of the worthwhile discussion of the topic at hand.

> But less than one in ten heavily-downvoted posts that I read, has a reply to indicate why that post was downvoted. I feel that number is low.

I actually feel that that number is too high. If a comment is worth responding to, its probably not worth downvoting, and if it ought to be downvoted, responding is counterproductive.

> Like I said, it's as though readers need to be "protected" from reading your post (by making it harder to read)

Well, yes, the whole point of moderation, community or otherwise, is to suppress content that is outside of what is desired for the forum so as to maintain the character that is intended for the forum.

Put bluntly, censorship based on the community perception of how well posts align with the ideals expressed in the guidelines is the whole purpose of having downvotes. It is, by design, fairly soft censorship that doesn't (through downvotes alone) actually make the content unavailable, but it is exactly to protect the community from the unwanted content interfering with the wanted content.

> which is patronizing to readers and a bit harsh to the author of the post

I don't think its patronizing to the reader to hold out a representation of what the purpose of the forum is and to minimize the visibiity of content that the community has found to be out of line with that purpose. Nor do I find the manner in which HN does it "harsh to the author", despite myself having had many comments go gray -- though far fewer stay there.

In fact, I've often found that a comment going gray triggers my own review and reconsideration, and an edit which makes me happier with the comment. Or results in me deleting a comment which on reflection I realize was ill-considered.

> Greying-out earnest comments merely because they are useless (and remember that's in the best case) is over the line because the consequence of a false positive is too high and the threshold for it to happen (again - one downvote) is too low

I disagree. While its true that a slight greying that lets you know that a comment has been downvoted occurs at a net of one downvote, I don't see that as a "too high" consequence of a false positive. The slight greying at that level doesn't impair readability, and if anything draws more attention to the post. Its only at higher levels of downvoting that there is a substantial negative consequence.

I fail to see the harm you are concerned about here. Perhaps its just being around a long time in online forums, but I think the consequences of no moderation (and voting that doesn't actually reduce the visibility of negatively-voted comments at some point is "no moderation" for this purpose), or of relying primarily on centralized moderation rather than community moderations, are much worse than HN's style of community moderation. And while there are different styles of community moderation (e.g., those used at Slashdot or Reddit), I don't see any clear evidence that they produce better results than HN's.

Well, since you've staked out your reply in direct and total point-by-point opposition to my own, bizarro-world style, there isn't much room for discussion. I will address one thing:

> It is not generally the practice to comment to explain downvotes, and, IMO -- especially given the absence of collapsed threads on HN, but even if it were present -- it would defeat the point of downvoting and decrease the signal-to-noise ratio to do so, as then meta-discussion of the problem with posts would take more real estate, at the expense of the worthwhile discussion of the topic at hand.

I am not suggesting that every single downvote warrants an explanation. I thought that was obvious. But if you look at the two extremes:

* No downvote is ever expanded on in a comment by the downvoter. The site rules themselves will explain some of the downvotes. However, alone they do a poor job of encapsulating what this community considers productive and unproductive discussion. We usually don't know why downvotes are happening. Nothing improves unless mods take direct action to make it happen, as this community has no mechanism for self-regulation.

* Every downvote is explained. I gather you believe this is the worse of the two extremes and I agree. The forum disappears up its own asshole in endless boring meta-discussion and everyone leaves.

Downvotes should be explained sometimes. My one-in-ten figure from before was a total guess. I haven't harvested any data and I don't have any spreadsheets, but I too often see greyed-out posts that I can't for the life of me figure out why they were downvoted. As in, even if I approach it with an unusually high degree of cynicism I still can't guess at a reason. It's gotten to the point that if I see a grey post I'll just automatically upvote it even if I don't read it. I encourage others to do the same.

I disagree, explanation is fundamentally incompatible with the purpose of downvoting. I suppose it would make sense if the explanations were hidden and only made visible to the poster whose comment was downvoted, or by activelt interacting with the downvoted post. Otherwise, its polluting discussion of the topic with meta-discussion, compounding further the problem posed by posts that are downvoted.