More downvoted comments over the past couple months?

> Unfortunately, pg said downvoting for disagreement is perfectly acceptable, so it's probably not going away

Even Homer nods. Pg blew that one. He said:

   I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement.
   Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it
   seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.

If the down arrows merely did the opposite of the up arrows on comments, and so moved the comment farther down the page, then he'd have a good point. However, as soon as a comment goes non-positive (which will happen if the very first person to vote on it votes down), the color is changed to make it harder to read, and the more it goes down, the harder it gets to read.

If down votes are used for mere expression of disagreement, this means that if a topic is at all controversial it only takes a bit of bad luck to have your comment seen first by a few people who disagree, and then it is so sunk that people can't read it, and the people who would have up voted and brought it back to visibility never see it.

When I read HN on mobile, sometimes I cannot follow the conversation on controversial but interesting topics because so many of the comments are greyed out. When I get back to my desktop (where I override the HN stylesheet to mark those comments in a different way that doesn't make them hard to read), I invariably find that a large fraction of the greyed out comments were well written and valuable contributions to the discussion.

Because of that, several times I've refrained from participating in threads that I thought were going to be controversial.

To be fair, that's an opinion stated by pg, not necessarily a statement of site policy. The opinion of the site's administrator and creator matters, but it isn't incontrovertible.

And it's still a practice with rather disturbing implications, seeing as how downvoting causes a comment to fade further and further; it implies that dissenting comments (regardless of their validity) are worthy of being silenced.

>since there was no longer an easy way to separate valuable comments from not-valuable ones

You could read them, and if you don't like them, stop reading them. Granted, it's harder to automate, but if the tradeoff is having to engage with more of the narrative of a thread then I don't know that that's a bad trade. So many variables can go into a comment score that the actual number becomes less meaningful than the sort order of the threads themselves.

There are healthy ways the HN community can be challenged. Given that it is a community rather than an individual the domain of challenges are those appropriate for communities in general and the unique aspects of HN in particular. What is and isn't appropriate is a variation of HN's community sentiment toward political topics.

Some opinions are meant to foster discussion. Others are meant to invite disagreement or structured with a disregard for that potential. Cargo culting is less if an issue than trolling behavior, in my opinion, and the diversity of ideas I see on HN has increased from the days when mentioning Microsoft in a positive light or Apple in a negative one invited downvotes to grey.