[etchalon]

Given the community works through a voting system, the downvoting of provocative and speculative opinions is the community's way of signaling that such opinions aren't welcome – or at least need to be better worded to encourage discussion.

Calling that a "cultural of suppression" instead of "the intended outcome of a feature" seems weird.

[jltsiren]

I don't think there is such thing as "the community" on any site with more than ~100 active users. It's more likely that there are many overlapping communities, each with its own norms and expectations.

The way this site works, the intended semantics of upvotes and downvotes are roughly "promote" and "suppress". Or at least that's the way I see it. But it's obvious that many people see it otherwise and use them as "agree" and "disagree".

[etchalon]

I think that's a radical revision to what the word "community" usually means.

[jltsiren]

It could be that the English concept "community" is subtly different from Finnish "yhteisö".

Another way to state this could be that as a community grows larger, the shared norms become weaker. Large communities often have subcommunities that believe that their norms are more universal within the community than they actually are. Ugly things tend to happen when two such subcommunities collide.