Even in /r/television, people downvote discussion of television when they disagree with the commenter's basic opinion of a television show.
The downvote button is not meant to be an "I disagree with your opinion" button, but it is that now.
I think the downvote should be for low-effort or low-contribution comments. I abhor "^this" or "lol", nevermind trolling or unfounded disinformation.
To some extent yes, but I wouldn't say all the time - it's definitely a lot better here compared to places like Reddit.
I understand it was an attempt to police spam. However I still think that slashdot perhaps struck the right balance (the old slashdot I mean, I don't know how they do it now). Randomly a small percentage of users get mod ability when they read the threads which enables them to vote / classify / tag spam.
I ended up taking a little hiatus from the Internet and left some mods I trusted in control, and when I went back after a few months I discovered the original mod had let Reddit take it over and install their own team to make it a default subreddit. Why wouldn't they? Now, it is what it is. Still, I look at it and know I designed that logo, I wrote the rules that have been repurposed and are buried in some wiki that nobody reads, and I wrote the stylesheet for the sidebar. Oh well.
In HN, people tend to pile up on the topmost comment and create enormous trees of comments, just because the next top comment is way too far down
Reddit reached Eternal September a while ago, so the key is to find small (yet active) communities whose content doesn't make it to r/all. I moderate a cycling community there, but we're really strict about what type of content gets posted. It sucks that we as a mod team have to do that, but if we don't our community gets overrun with memes, image macros, and rage comics.