People have always done that, but down votes don’t actually matter so why worry about it?
I make plenty of comments knowing people will downvote them based on content and still ended up so much positive karma it would take serious effort to burn it all.
I think the overall vibe is quite different from what it was in 2010 say? It used to be 'post erlang' when there was too much off topic posting, but these days discussions seem to be highly dominated by people who are 'tech adjacent' and have no idea how to code or build products, and no experience outside of big, crappy, late-stage 'tech' companies.
downvotes cause you to be essentially a lite-shadow ban if they happen enough, especially if in a flagged thread/comment. You get rate limited, which means only 5 comments per day allowed. Max.
So, sorry, but while I didn't downvote you, I do disagree with you; entirely. Validly.
That's a sign that your account is rate-limited. We rate limit accounts when they repeatedly get involved in flamewars or regularly break the site guidelines or post lots of low-quality (for HN) comments. It's a crude tool but one of the few we have to prevent such things from overrunning the site.
The thread also has interesting discussions on other mod tools: shadowbanning, IP bans, and the like.
Apparently the way to un-rate-limit an account is to send in an email and mention that you will "stick to civil, substantive comments that scrupulously follow" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Some amount of convincing prostration may be required, as a sort of high-level turing test. There does not seem to be a way to do this while not giving away your email address (which was not required at signup).
The moderator mentioned something about repeated, human-written warnings before rate-limiting, but this does not seem to be the case now (2020) - rate limiting seems to be a milder, less-known variant of the shadowban.
Look. All I know is what I looked up, and have read in the past; and that I wasn't rate limited until after I commented on a thread that suddenly got mega-flagged and I deleted my comment to try to be safe. Wasn't fast enough I guess, cause either an auto-bot just rate limited everyone in it; or a mod did.
Prior to that, I wasn't rate limited. After that, I was. Make of it what you will.
I make plenty of comments knowing people will downvote them based on content and still ended up so much positive karma it would take serious effort to burn it all.