This is sadly so true. It's hard to play devil's advocate sometimes because unless you are going for the "conventional wisdom" some people are bound to disagree with you, and disagreement is often expressed in the form of downvotes. Since offering a different point of view is discouraged, the discussion inevitably trends towards being bland or rah-rah in nature.

What to do? The wise solution is to just ignore Karma -- who cares about that except for the egomaniacs? But the truth is that we are all human, and when I offer something that adds to the discussion but got downvoted to oblivion in return, it hurts, at least sometimes. And in those cases when I couldn't care less, I feel a little bit wiser.