Downvoting because you disagree provides the exact same benefit to the reader that upvoting because you agree provides. "Downvotes aren't for disagreeing" is a

Downvoting because you disagree provides the exact same benefit to the reader that upvoting because you agree provides. "Downvotes aren't for disagreeing" is an absurd redditism. > "Community groupthink is not strongly related to truth" In strongly technical discussions, which are common on HN and which HN should be optimized for, "groupthink" and "correct" tend to correlate quite nicely. Whenever there is a concrete notion of "correct", it works well. It is only when "correct" becomes subjective (such as in political discussions) that shit gets messy.