Clearly, you're incorrect, because several people have explicitly stated that they appreciated the mention of this site (and probably there are more who were glad to find out but didn't comment). `bemmu`, Candy Japan's founder, also positively responded to the comment in question.
In my opinion, downvotes on HN should be reserved for malicious comments like trolls, ad hominems, off-topic spam (real spam, rare on HN thanks to the mods. not just "I don't like this comment and think it's off-topic"), factually incorrect comments, and "reddit style" humor.
Users should not downvote comments they simply disagree with, on-topic promotional comments, and tangentially related comments. Tangents are a great way to discover new ideas.
However, there is a small cadre of HN downvoters who disagree with me, and who rabidly downvote any comment with a whiff of being off-topic or controversial. These downvoters must spend lots of time on HN, since their downvotes always come very quickly after a comment is submitted.
Luckily, they do not represent the majority of HNers who can downvote, since comments like this one typically crawl back up into positive territory after the first 30-60 minutes. Some of my comments that were initially downvoted for being "off-topic" even crawled back up to over 10 upvotes.
To the GP commenter, please don't get too frustrated. It's a relatively small number of people who downvote useful comments like yours. It's true that they are among the first to vote on comments, but almost always their downvotes are reversed after some time.
People whining about down votes and then complaining about it only makes the discussions worse. Your comment is going to be seen by maybe .1% of HN. There are better avenues to raise this issues.
If you want to change how down votes are handled going off topic in a discussion is not how you do it.
If you are complaining about down votes you are polluting the discussion even more than the erroneous down votes themselves.
People are people. It takes more to change behavior than complaints.
If that's the case, then both you and I are pissing into the wind here.
> If you are complaining about down votes you are polluting the discussion even more than the erroneous down votes themselves.
What about complaining about complaints about downvotes? Does that pollute the discussion or is it exempt?
There are established norms that downvoting is not just for the cases you mentioned: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171.
I'm not going to sit here through the fifteenth iteration of BSD v GPL even if the arguments are cogent and civil.
> I'm not going to sit here through the fifteenth iteration of BSD v GPL even if the arguments are cogent and civil.
Yes.
The site founders have explicitly stated that downvoting to disagree is fine. There is also the 'flag' mechanism for toxic comments.