From the article: "Cheng and co began by compiling a dataset of the comments associated with news articles on four online communities: CNN.com, a general news site; Breitbart.com, a political new site; IGN.com, a computer gaming news site; and Allkpop.com, a Korean entertainment site. The data includes 1.2 million threads with 42 million comments and 114 million votes from 1.8 million different users." I would respectfully suggest that the comments from news readers on news sites may not be a dataset that generalizes to discussion and news aggregation sites like Hacker News, especially because Hacker News starts us out with a set of user guidelines[1] particularly geared to encouraging sustained user participation in thoughtful discussion. There is also a welcome message for new users here[2] (I forget how it is implemented, as I am such an old user that I think I joined HN before it was implemented) that packages the rules in a slightly different format.
In other words, most of the time when I am downvoted here, what I ask myself is, "How could I have rewritten that comment to make it more clear or more persuasive," or sometimes, "Was that really a constructive addition to the discussion here?" I'm not generally spoiling for a fight or crushed in my self-esteem after being downvoted here. As far as I know, that happens to almost everyone here sooner or later. It sure has happened to me over the years
On my part, I downvote some comments, for reasons suggested in the welcome message, but I try to make sure that my upvotes predominate over my downvotes. And I don't keep an enemies list. If someone makes a thoughtful comment, they get an upvote, period, even if they disagreed strenuously with me just hours before. The idea here is to help good comments gain enough attention to promote thoughtful discussion in all good senses of the word "thoughtful." Maybe Hacker News is just plain different from most news discussion websites.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html