[UnoriginalGuy]

I agree, that a lot of downvotes are caused by tone, writing style, or clarity. However there's also a lot of downvotes caused simply by being against the consensus. And while I feel like sometimes people are against the group-think just for the sake of it (or to ruffle feathers) there are also times when a healthy dose of alternative viewpoints can dampen the group-think getting too extreme.

For example, just yesterday there was a thread talking about the US turning root DNS over to the UN. This thread turned into a jingoistic nightmare talking about how awesome America is, how they're the only true bastion of freedom, and how the rest of the world is a savage freedom hating backwater. That thread desperately needed more counter-balance, but no doubt people like myself were concerned that the groupthink became so focused that counter-balance would have been met with swift and numerous down downvotes (and risk site privileges because of being downvoted too heavily).

This isn't a complaint about downvotes, this is pointing out that downvotes change posting behaviour both for good (i.e. stopping people being jerks) and for bad (i.e. stopping opinion counter to the "group think").

[brudgers]

To me, the referenced discussion is the sort of context where if I'm outraged enough to write a rebuttal to someone's political views, I'm probably better off just downvoting...and so is the thread and so is HN.

There's no escalation. There's no feeding trolling behavior. There's no toehold on my future: I won't be curious about replies. It's cathartic. One click and I'm done expressing disagreement.