[dang]

Your original comment made a grandiose claim about a controversial topic that had no content other than borderline name-calling ("antisocial and pointless"). Far from proving your point, that seems like a good candidate for downvoting to me. You also broke the HN guidelines by going on about getting downvoted. When people do that as a rhetorical device, that's a marker of a low-quality comment.

[superswordfish]

I wrote a pretty decent reply to this, then realized that posting it here would be utterly self-defeating. The double standard you're pushing here is disgusting, and you know it. Time to find a less negative programming community, or one that's at least a touch self-aware.

[tomhoward]

Let's talk about self-awareness.

Your account has been active for 158 days. HackerNews has existed for nearly 10 years – at least 3000 days. On pretty much every single one of those days, pg, dang and others have worked to build this site into something that reflects the wishes of its community – a community that continues to grow in number and quality as a result of their tireless efforts.

The downvoting/greying feature has been developed, discussed, reviewed and refined steadily throughout the history of the site. That will continue as the community evolves, but right now, it reflects a status quo that the overwhelming majority of the community endorses, as evidenced by their continued engagement with the site and the particular feature.

Any user is always welcome to suggest an improvement to the site and provide a thoughtful and articulate justification for it.

You, on the other hand, have entered this discussion with just 158 days of history and 276 karma points, trashed a core feature of the site as "antisocial and pointless" and demanded its removal without suggesting an alternative, then broken the site guidelines by complaining about the community's response to your demand.

Then when the site's administrator – a person whom the longest-standing and most positive contributors to the community respect and value as the thoughtful, fair and hard-working bedrock of this site – takes the trouble to explain why you've been downvoted, you abuse him as "disgusting".

It's worth reflecting that dang often finds himself being attacked/abused by people on opposing sides of the one argument, with each of them complaining that he's favouring the other.

If there's a community that welcomes the kind of behaviour you've exhibited here, you should most certainly defect to it right away.