Please don't mistake me, I wasn't trying to whine about downvotes. I wanted to find out the reason why people are downvoting, rather than replying. Hacker News strikes me as a very odd place; on one hand, encouraging discussion of interesting topics, on the other hand, giving a group of people with more than 500 points this ability to hide discussion they like.

It would be much better if, rather than disagreeing by downvoting, which is effectively a statement like "I don't like that" (which humorously, HN discourages if you state explicitly), to either say nothing at all (like those with <500 karma) or to state your disagreement.

For me it's hard, too. The HN moderators have decided to block me from posting too quickly. I never used to get this message until recently; now I am told that "You're posting too fast, please slow down.", which to be honest, I can't describe the words of irritation I would otherwise use if I wasn't being civil on this forum. It's so silly to be stopping people from engaging in quick discussion. I know it's to prevent flamewars, but the fact that it applies even if I'm not flaming (which I don't do much here) is ridiculous.

The worst part is where the HN moderators roll in with the classic "we've detached this and marked it off-topic". This is perhaps the one thing which reddit/<n>chan gets right, the moderators won't tell you that something is off topic just because they think it is. It evidently isn't off topic if people are discussing it.

This website really does baffle me sometimes. In some cases it's unparalleled for informative discussion where I can learn sometimes about hotter topics. On the other hand, it has this truly horrible and infantile elite-downvoters culture which exists to control how you think and what kind of opinions you espouse, for fear of being downvoted. It encourages self-censure to the tune of the opinion of the downvoting group. You have to dance their jig, or have your comment greyed out, which probably attracts more downvotes.

Having one discussion floating to the top doesn't mean that the other discussions are unavailable. If it really is as uninteresting as the downvoter thinks it is, few people will engage in it.

I'm sorry for the rant, but this website is very grating, and it's not because of the users, it's because of the way it's run, and what powers the users have. It's almost as if downvoting was implemented beacuse it's known to be exactly like an "I don't like that" message, which will make anyone annoyed when all they want to do is engage in thoughtful discussion. And don't get me started on how people will downvote you on topics when you speak of politics they disagree with or make cogent points. I've noticed this on both sides; when I speak of my Communism and anarchism, I'm getting downvoted for it. When some speak of their strongly libertarian "an"cap principles, they're getting downvoted. And time and time again, I've been told by those helpful commenters - it's not beacuse of the quality of my comments. It's just that people disagree. And that means I get my comment greyed out and I'm not allowed to post more than twice every two hours.

I really wish intelligent discussion like on HN would take place on other websites (except reddit). That way, I wouldn't have to deal with this elite-downvoter culture. And before someone brings up the point that discussion here is intelligent because of the power to downvote, it would be nice if there were some evidence for that assertion. Mailing lists and forums and the old-style chans (by old-style I mean before the addition of backlinks and "(You)"s) didn't have downvotes.