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.
I don't believe that "downvote to disagree" is compatible with "encouraging intellectual diversity". I tend to only do it when disagrees particularly poorly, eg bad evidence or reasoning, or is being a jerk. But I definitely have noticed more downvoting in the last couple months, of myself and others where it didn't feel like the downvoters were interested in suffering the existence of disagreement.
Yep. I down vote instead of "wrestling a pig in a mudpit." This thread is a perfect example. I'm not going to convince anyone who is complaining about downvoting in disagreement that downvoting for disagreement is good because they are complaining about rather than enquiring into the use of downvotes.
Stick around long enough and you realize it all evens out over time, wrong upvotes balance wrong downvotes...or in some sorts of threads overwhelm them...and the way to avoid diwnvotes is to write better comments. Accusing 'other people' of bad behavior is a lazy injustice.
Limited numbers of people have the ability to downvote. Everyone with an account has the ability to upvote.
When you see a comment that has a single downvote for disagreement you're also seeing a comment that has several thousand logged-in views that didn't want to supply a corrective upvote.
I'm not complaining about the concept of downvoting. My only concern is with the implementation, and the implication that dissent is a bad thing worthy of suppression. A better approach would be to provide a visual indicator of controversy that doesn't make the comment in question more difficult to read (perhaps some smiley/frowney face below the voting buttons or some other graphical indicator?).
You can find plenty of examples in a lot of the more heated/busy HN discussions. I'm too lazy to dig up more examples, but they're pretty common (especially once politics comes into play; I've noticed a bit of a left-wing bent on HN over the last couple of years (which isn't much of a surprise considering how much of an influence Bay-Area/"Valley" culture has on HN)).
By using the downvote button as a disagreement button, and by observing that using said downvote button causes the comment's text to fade further and further from black to grey to white, it can be observed that any case of disagreement expressed via the downvote button results in supression of the comment's content (by making it harder to read).
