That's true. Maybe the issue is that when there's only a 'down' and an 'up' button, people infer everything into it. Maybe we should have an 'up' button for interesting posts, a 'flag' button for posts that don't add to the discussion, and 'agree' and 'disagree' buttons to make it clear that it's a different thing from upvoting a comment.
Then people could turn on or off some way to see which posts are heavily agreed or disagreed with without downvoting interesting posts just because you disagree. You could even have a system where you mark people you respect and then only see which posts they agreed with to get a more personal feel? Might be an interesting discussion board idea to pursue.
Certainly, although it's clear that the largest part of the context would be the audience that the comment is exposed to. And it also shows that the upvote and downvote feature is not used correctly here either - it's used to promote or hide comments that the viewer agrees or disagrees with.
Just the same as Reddit. It's a deeper issue than just being 'reddit', and it's more about online discussion in general.
HN isn't all that different, so it's probably about more than just reddit.
For example, you can post the same remarks criticizing functional programming in a post about C# or Java and get upvotes, while the same post in a Haskell discussion will be downvoted. You can try the experiment yourself to verify it.
This applies to companies as well - you will be upvoted for pro-Microsoft or anti-Google posts in a news topic about Microsoft, and the reverse in a news topic about Google. This is because people who use Microsoft products will be very interested in Microsoft news, but not interested enough in Google news to go and downvote opinions they disagree with there.
Then people could turn on or off some way to see which posts are heavily agreed or disagreed with without downvoting interesting posts just because you disagree. You could even have a system where you mark people you respect and then only see which posts they agreed with to get a more personal feel? Might be an interesting discussion board idea to pursue.