Agreed. If they're this adamant about keeping the fading functionality tied to downvoting, they should just do away with downvoting all together, because fading just seems to worsen the discussion.

I've lost count of how many times I've seen perfectly good insightful comments around here that get ignored because some people decided to downvote them for some arbitrary reason. In fact, it's so bad, that I'd say I've barely seen any good instances of fading for the past year; they just seems to encourage group-think almost every time.

I'm ok with the idea of downvoting meaning disagreement, since that's how voting systems always end up being used anyway (not to mention pg approves of that interpretation as well), but penalizing comments to become practically non-existent based on a few downvotes (last time I noticed, a score of -1 started the fading) is just not conducive to interesting discussion.