I didn't share the site's unstated assumption that making comments that people upvote isn't being a "contributor to the community". You can control downvoting

I didn't share the site's unstated assumption that making comments that people upvote isn't being a "contributor to the community". You can control downvoting for disagreement by explicitly stating a norm against it, as StackOverflow does with alt text over the downvote and Reddit does with Reddiquette. I don't believe I had had a comment downvoted before this one expressing disagreement with downvoters. However, I have found that many downvoted comments do contribute to the discussion, and even earn my upvote about 25% of the time. I don't think the downvote inner circle has a wholly positive effect on the site.