There are a number of perfectly reasonable comments in this thread that carry the stain of appearing in light gray.
EDIT: It appears that I've been downvoted, and I don't know why. Anyone care to explain?
Indeed.
> I would very much like to see downvoting eliminated, or at least modified so that a small number of upvotes can counteract it.
No way. It was mostly like that not that long ago and the site was terrible. Filled with pseudo-spam and no criticism was possible.
The problem is humans don't have good manners. We are full of biases and try to do anything to advance whatever ideas we favor at the moment. Downvoting criticism is one of them.
Paul Graham said several years ago that it made sense to him to use it for disagreement (because people might use upvotes for agreement), but I continue to feel uncomfortable with that and try never to use it that way. I try to upvote things that I disagree with that I thought were well-put or constructive.
Maybe an alternative would be to look at Paul Graham's own "hierarchy of disagreement" and try to use downvoting only for things at DH2 and below.
Rather than each comment having a global score, each user sees comments scored based on their voting history. This means non-conforming opinions no longer get buried for everyone.
An upvote should mean "I'd like to see more of this" not "I'd like everyone to see more of this".
Just because there's an up button and a down button close together, and clearly the intent that they are correlated, doesn't mean that the usage in practice is the same.
A vote up means that the post is on topic, and relevant of showing to others preferentially in the eyes of the voter.
A vote down is often used on topics that the voter simply /disagrees/ with, irrespective of relevance to the topic.
Therefore I would propose that 'mixed votes' indicate a contentious, but likely on topic, point of discussion for further discourse and refinement.
There should clearly be a threshold (a large number of votes, with a vast majority of them negative) for indicating actually harmful content.
Huh. When I look over light-grey and dead comments in the stories I read, I see that most downvotes are not for non-conforming opinions.
However, by default, the page should randomize the display of comments every time it's loaded in order to force people to view some viewpoints occasionally that they might not like.
The reason I come here is to have my opinions and views challenged; this refines the metrics by which I judge reality and the viewpoints I consider valid and generally enriches my life. Google has become all about pushing a viewpoint. Go into google right now and start typing in "a", "b", "c"; first thing that comes up is large big-box retail chains. Used to be you could find fringe topics via major search engines, now everything lives in it's walled garden; giving corps the ability to control viewpoints like that is somewhere in-between suicide and genocide. You want people constantly debating and discussing topics and not forcing themselves into an orthodoxy because it forces the habitation of developing a personal scientific method which doubles as a BS detector and inoculation against agents of psychological warfare.