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It serves both to manage the S/N ratio and to provide feedback to commenters on what the community sees as signal vs. noise.No, it provides feedback as to what the community wishes to see as to better help those who care conform to it.
Absolutely useless, unimaginative comments that contribute nothing and state the obvious are seldom downvoted, so long as they not voice anything that disagrees with the voterbase, and may even be upvoted.
> I don’t see that often on threads with substantial discussion. I suppose if that was a real problem, weighting upvotes by some measure of how relatively unfavorable the comment’s position is at the time upvoted would mitigate it.
I went through your own list of comments and could find some greyed out comments that really had no business being greyed out and downvoted.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26815734
This is not noise, this is something someone disagreed with, for reasons I don't understand.
I've seen quite a fair bit of greyed out comments on H.N. that were accurate and informative, as the comments that truly do not belong are most likely removed by the moderators to begin with.
I believe that comments are most likely to be upvoted by users when they say something the user already agrees with without thinking, as such something that tells him nothing new. — the end result is that the least informative, most obvious comments tend to be the most upvoted.