Sure, but when everyone else uses the upvote/downvote button that way it doesn’t matter how you personally use it. The end result is anything that goes against the hivemind gets suppressed.

I’ve had fully scientifically sourced rebukes of things (effectively, straight up facts) get downvoted to oblivion on Reddit. Hundreds or thousands of people didn’t see that their preconceived notions were probably wrong. It’s no wonder politics has become more insular.

HN is better than most, thankfully.

> HN is better than most, thankfully.

Indeed. Sometimes purely factual (but disliked/"too real") comments get like -200 upvotes, with no chance of redemption, even if it's pretty obvious everything is factual and adds to the topic.

Sometimes that happens on HN as well, but I've noticed that eventually it'll turn around. So saying something "true + unpopular + knee-jerk-inducing" can trigger a flood of 5-10 downvotes, but it eventually turns around as people seem to upvote heavily downvoted comments more, I guess.