Downvoting on opinions you disagree with diminishes the value of HN, because then there will be ideas which may have merit, or lead to thoughtful insights, whic

Downvoting on opinions you disagree with diminishes the value of HN, because then there will be ideas which may have merit, or lead to thoughtful insights, which no one will speak for fear of downvotes. > I applaud you for uttering what is clearly a minority opinion here Me too! I think HN can be too much of an echo chamber sometimes, especially when it comes to politics. (Whether articles like this one are HN-relevant material is questionable, but I've found the comments here to be much more well-reasoned than most of the political discourse I've seen on the Internet.) In fact, I personally do my part to help this by occasionally playing devil's advocate -- saying things I don't necessarily believe, which I know will be controversial, risking downvotes solely for the sake of stimulating a good discussion. People sometimes find it very difficult to agree to disagree, especially about highly controversial subjects like politics. This has a chilling effect even on me: I try very hard to keep this account separate from my real identity, so people whose opinion I care about won't take one of my devil's advocate comments out of context. (For that matter, I tend not to advertise my actual political views to people unless I know them well and think they will either agree with me, or are intellectually mature enough to accept that sometimes people acting in good faith can have different opinions than they do. And I think that I am so constituted that I would act in this way in the current US political environment no matter what my views actually were.) I also upvote comments I disagree with, if they're sufficiently well-written and thought-provoking, especially if they seem to have been downvoted solely because people disagree with the opinion.