[mrvc]

Take as an example some comments I made prior to making this post in the climate change thread currently on the frontpage (ice age). Although I have now deleted these, I simply stated that climate change prediction was uncertain due to the number of factors involved. A simple 2 line or so comment in reply to a poster asking why conflicting views existed on the subject. I believe it was of value (it answered his/her question, yet was of course an unpopular opninion to hold. A few minutes later it hit -1.

I won't be repeating the mistake of thinking I can discuss a matter openly here and believe downvoting adds nothing to a discussion (in contrast to upvoting which can be very useful for sorting comments).

[JoachimSchipper]

That is not a very valuable comment, though. You may have received a better score if you posted a not-so-valuable comment defending a popular position, but that doesn't mean that well-argued defences of unpopular positions receive the same treatment.

Being downvoted has a much higher emotional impact than being upvoted, but it does help with sorting comments, obviously.

[mrvc]

It does help in sorting, but i'd suggest it sorts by popularity, not by quality as we tend to assume.

I don't know about you guys, but I'm here to read interesting perspectives on interesting topics. I don't really care to reaffirm a popular opinion, irrespective of quality or substance.

[ColinWright]

In that case, why do you care about the voting? You will always get the group-think out-voting the carefully reasoned but unpopular. All you need to do is read - perhaps simply skim - all the comments. Find users whose opinion seems to be worth reading, and then seek out their comments.

Removing down-votes won't help the problem you've identified.

[JoachimSchipper]

That's what I increasingly find myself doing. The downside is that you get less and less exposed to new material; "old" HN would usually surface e.g. tptacek's comments, but there would also be some highly-voted and insightful comments by relative nobodies who were experts in the particular field being discussed. This still happens, but reading the highest-voted comments is becoming less and less worthwhile.

[wnight]

The problem is that down-votes have account consequences. They aren't the mirror opposite of an up-vote. Ten upvotes and a post is just popular, ten downvotes and you might get banned.

If moderation was a flag that some people cared about but that left everything intact then people could ignore it if they wanted.

[JoachimSchipper]

Do you think you get banned for the downvotes, or for the comment? I don't think anybody (here) is proposing removing the "flag" button...

[JoachimSchipper]

"Popularity, not quality" is the big problem of any social site. However, removing downvotes doesn't help: "anti-canonical" opinions won't gather many upvotes either. [EDIT: well, hopefully they will. But the trend is that they increasingly don't.]

[ColinWright]

I remember seeing it, and remember thinking - well, that's pretty content-free.

    I simply stated that climate change prediction was
    uncertain due to the number of factors involved. 

Exactly - you didn't really add anything useful to the discussion. We all know it's complicated. We all know there are lots of factors.

I didn't down-vote it, but I can see why others did.