There is very little value in knowing that some people disagree with a comment, but there is tremendous value in learning other ideas. This is a bad policy.
Remember, HN doesn't even show the vote counts on posts, so you can't extract hardly any agreement-disagreement info from a post (other than it's not so bad as to be downvoted to oblivion). The true and important function of the votes is to control visibility.
If you get downvoted, that kinda feels bad, if you get upvoted, that kinda feels good. It shapes your discussion and teaches you the rules of what the community finds acceptable/unacceptable.
What is the honest to god pragmatic result of this policy?
You're training people not to say something others disagree with.
Even if you don't agree with that, downvote to disagree causes pragmatic problems outside of training! Consider a discussion where someone starts off with an unpopular view, and then an interesting discussion happens back and forth between two parties discussing that position. Downvote to disagree hides that discussion.
If so, you should be able to find three examples. Can I please see them? Specifically, three comments that aren't in any way rude, downvoted for expressing an unpopular view?
The reason I'm curious is that I try to watch out for that, yet have only seen one comment recently which seemed to me downvoted purely for expressing an unpopular opinion, and even it was somewhat borderline.
> You're training people not to say something others disagree with.
That's not true if most such comments get more upvotes than downvotes.
here:
this was 15 days ago.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7381397
> That's not true if most such comments get more upvotes than downvotes.
so it's not true were training people to keep unpopular opinions to themselves, because if those opinions will also be upvoted... because why? Because people don't agree with them? What?