I don't care about the upvotes either. I care about why somebody thinks one way or the other.
Maybe I will agree, or disagree. Maybe I will learn something. But simply downvoting because you don't agree leaves no new information for me or anybody else reading to learn something.
I could be horribly wrong. And the process of being told why somebody thinks I am wrong might inlighten somebody else even if I hold to my initial view.
That being said, the voting system AFAIK on HN is more about being relevant to the topic, and less about agreeing. Although in practice upvotes tend to be more about agreeing and down votes more about being off topic or illrevent.
Not everybody can downvote, so when somebody does it means they have been around long enough to gain enough magical internet points to do so. So they might have some real insight that could help a OP or inlighten others. Along with making a good conversation even if no agreement is made at the end.
> I look forward to the national election where a politician stops what they're doing to complain every single time someone doesn't vote for them, and interrupt what's happening to demand an explanation.
Nobody is a politician here, what does that have to do with anything? This entire site was designed to talk about things, so I am hardly interrupting "what's happening"
> "cost a ton more than you realize" - unless you look at the prices for the contract you're agreeing to? Y'know, like you do?
AWS has public pricing, I can compare them to other publicly priced places. I don't need a contract that simply don't exist in most cases.
> "Should have" - telling someone what their company should have done, without even knowing what their company /is/, let alone what they were trying to achieve and what constraints they had on their available options. Assuming or implying that the cheaper thing is always the more correct thing and no other factors can change that.
I can compare server for server , compute for compute, and all the above. I don't really need to know what our anybody else is doing with a system to understand the raw resources you can get from the services offered and compare them based off that.