"I don't know why you were downvoted" seems to be HN's unofficial motto.
We want all information that's not outright wrong or uncalled for so we can get to the best understanding. Downvoting hides viewpoints and makes us work with less information. It also powerfully biases people against a viewpoint, often unjustifiably.
Downvoting would be fine if we all always used strong reasoning in good faith. I don't think that happens for most downvotes.
I hear you, but I don’t pay for this toy, and the owner(s) run it as they see fit. I do agree with you though that I dislike down voting.
Say something that puts certain companies (you know who you are) in really bad light and your post will be magically flagged.
That's why the site guidelines ask you not to post evidenceless insinuations of astroturfing or brigading: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. There needs to be something objective to go on, not just however the mind connects the dots based on a few data points. People with opposite tastes to yours connect the dots in an entirely contradictory way, I assure you.
But please don't dismiss this so quickly. I have seen pretty harmless types of post getting brigaded or flagged pretty consistently. This happens more often to new or less known users - who might have something interesting to say but are quickly shut down.
Now, we can always blame it on different tastes or whatever, but knowing that certain companies engage heavily in "online presence" wouldn't it be naive to think they don't operate on HN too??
Can you link some you've recently encountered?
To pick an example from a different domain, when one commenter accuses another of being a communist shill for China (a ridiculously common recreation), it's easy enough to look at the latter's history. Frequently you'll find that that user has been posting about, say, Julia programming, and house prices in Boise, since 2014. (I made that up but this is typical.) Could they still be a communist agent? Sure they could, but this kind of thinking quickly becomes madness.
Occam offers a perfectly good null hypothesis: people just disagree. HN is a large enough population sample that you're going to see users from every background and disagreement about every topic, including on every big tech company, which many users have strong feelings for/against. For some reason, though, internet users aren't satisfied by that and crave much more sinister explanations when things they dislike show up in the forum.
There are cognitive biases underlying this (I've written about them at [1] and [2], if you or anyone is curious), and I'm not seeing any information in your comments here that isn't easily within the normal range of such biases. Real astroturfing and other abuses exist—you can look through the endless history of [3] to find plenty of times where I talk about that and a few cases where we actually find it. But there's no question that real abuse is dwarfed by the imaginary abuses that internet users love to speculate about. Therefore the rule is: if you're to going to bring this up you need something objective to go on. It can't just be based on memory and feeling, because memory and feeling are entirely unreliable on this.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23716395
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Was it because I broke some rule, or was it because someone didn't like what I said?
Accounts that have been created to do that are low-quality accounts that soon accrue moderation penalties and eventually get banned—not because we disagree with the politics but because this is the main form of flamewar destroying this site. HN is a place for intellectual curiosity and curious conversation. If you want to do ideological warfare on the internet, that's a different game and you need to play it elsewhere.
Your comment didn't get removed. It did get detached from its original parent. That's standard moderation when the top comment gets replies that don't respond specifically to what it says (a.k.a. topjacking).
I suspect that MS employs a mouse army, but the reason is a mystery; my guess is it is just because they can. Apple downvoting appears to be more fanboi driven.