[dang]

Posting like this breaks the site guidelines. Would you please read them? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

One reason that guideline exists is that unfair downvotes frequently get canceled by users who come along, see the situation, and make a corrective upvote. Meanwhile complaints like this linger on in the thread, inaccurate and off-topic—they don't garbage-collect themselves. As an example, I noticed your other comment and upvoted it before I saw this comment here. Similarly, other users have upvoted the GP.

As with any stochastic process, there is a lot of error and spillage with downvotes. There's no way to perfect it; you have to ask whether the system is better off with it than without it. Forcing comments wouldn't help, and posting complaints certainly doesn't help.

[scruffups]

Why not have a meta discussion like a Wikipedia Talk page so comments like these would have room and critique won't be shut down.

Yesterday (you can look in my comment history) I ran into a situation where the person doing the down-voting turned out to be basing it on their opinion not fact (after they finally stated their opinion on the matter, which contradicts peer-reviewed research on the topic, I realized why they were down voting: insufficient depth of understanding of the topic) and no one came after them to correct the situation...

Either have people explain why they down-voted or have a Talk page where people can discuss their reasons, complain, etc, behind the scene.

[dang]

HN is a site for intellectual curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) and a meta forum would be a step away from that. It would fill up with litigious bickering and nitpicking, and demands for bureaucratic administration—all things that intellectually curious discussion requires having the restraint to avoid.

Edit: and it's for similar reasons that we don't publish a moderation log.