When I remember to do it, I downvote comments complaining about voting (yours too). Caring about number of votes seems narcissistic and in my opinion tries to turn HN into Reddit with all its negatives including karma farming. Downvoting is not flagging and there is rarely so many comments that downvoted comment would become effectively invisible at the end of xth page.
Yeah I don't think I'm complaining here. But pointing to certain dynamics.
There is a lot of the groupthink on HN, and this might be one of the mechanisms suppressing debating certain ideas.
Downvoting definitely surpresses well written contrarian arguments. It often kills the discussion by moving it down.
On a personal note. It's fun to see a comment get a lot of votes, and also fun to see it get a lot of downvotes. But I'm not very emotionally invested into it.
