Totally meta and OT but at the moment almost half the comments of this page are greyed out. It shows how lively the debate is (or maybe it'll settle one way or another, idk).
This doesn't mean that doing "Y" isn't the answer, it means that if you're going to bring "Y" up, bring up all of the best arguments against "Y" that you already know first. Otherwise, you're just throwing out a low-effort troll tempting some good neighbor to spend a half-hour crafting an elaborate response for you; one ultimately unnecessary for anyone who has interest enough in the subject to google "X" and read the first hit.
Your particular comment has probably been posted thousands of times, but HN isn't organized in a way that makes them easy to find.
Deservedly so. Most (if not all) of those comments are ad hominems and doesn't address the proposed system in the article at all. In fact, there is no evidence those commentors have even read the article. One of them actually complains about how photogenic he is!
Nevertheless, my objection was to the use of "voting as disagreement". That's what comments are for.
Oh, well that's a long lost fight. No matter how platform holders define a downvote, it has always meant I don't like this and there is too much inertia to change it.