Agreed - the only thing I dislike about HN at all is the tendency of some users to downvote anything they disagree with. It seems to have gotten worse over time

Agreed - the only thing I dislike about HN at all is the tendency of some users to downvote anything they disagree with. It seems to have gotten worse over time (I've been lurking several years longer than my current account). Now I occasionally come by threads with a large proportion of not-terrible comments greyed out, and it does make me avoid commenting anything that might be perceived unfavorably by someone. It also seems to encourage lots of throwaway accounts for single comments of unpopular opinions. I wish something could be done about this more than anything else, but I'm not sure what that would be.