Something that I've been finding lately is that replies to my posts have been downvoted when to me they're fairly reasonable disagreements with what I said. I've actually taken to upvoting replies to me that go grey a lot of the time, even though I don't particularly agree with what they're saying.
To me it seems like a lot more stuff is getting downvoted than used to, and I'm not sure I see a meaningful pattern in the places I see it happening.
What you're seeing is a side-effect of the changes kogir and I made to the algorithms, and we share your concern about it. We're watching the negatively scored comments closely to see how much of a problem this is. The fact that this change has had the huge benefit of reducing toxic comments does not make it 100% salutary in every respect.
My current sense is that about 1% of the negatively scored comments don't deserve it. In most cases, though, when users passing by see a slightly-faded-out comment, they identify unfairness and upvote it back to par. I do that a lot myself. If enough people do this, it's the ideal solution to the problem—community practice is better than intervention. If it isn't enough, we'll eventually do more.
>My current sense is that about 1% of the negatively scored comments don't deserve it.
There is a profoundly strong confirmation bias going on in this whole thread. Not only from you and the other mods (have comments gotten better? Comments, in my opinion, have gotten significantly worse. Yes, they're "nice", but more often than not of absolutely zero information or value), but much of the feedback you get whenever you post is of the pandering, supportive, back-patting sort. Because really, what is the alternative? The likely hellbanning or slowbanning that is so often the resort of HN?
For years the same "we're tuning algorithms" argument has been plied on HN. It is transparent, and I'm surprised anyone actually still buys that.
I think I'll stick up for us a little bit here. I said "my current sense" because I like to be cautious. But I literally look at every single negatively scored comment on the site—a task akin to walking through slop—watching for cases where the downvoted comment was both substantive and civil. There aren't many of them, in my view. 1% is an overestimate. If you think I'm wrong, let's see some examples. They ought to be easy to find.
Lame comments that aren't rude but just mediocre are also a problem, and one which has been growing for years. That's not really what Sam's post was about, though. We can't solve every problem at once; we don't even know yet what will help with that one. One thing that would not have helped, though, is allowing toxic comments to run rampant. HN already lost some good users because it was heading that way, and we weren't about to let that keep happening.
Edit: By the way, since kogir and I made this scoring change, noticeably fewer accounts have been getting banned.
To me it seems like a lot more stuff is getting downvoted than used to, and I'm not sure I see a meaningful pattern in the places I see it happening.