Being rude isn't helpful. It's not their fault, it's the unavoidable reality of treating complex social signalling as one-dimensional. At minimum Hacker News would need to separate approval/disapproval signals from assessments of whether a comment is constructive. That’s not a simple change given the obvious abuse vectors. It would require reliably distinguishing good-faith participants from bad actors. It can be done, but it's not easy.

The main reason sites avoid this approach is institutional rather than technical. Adding algorithmic mediation invites accusations of algorithmic bias whenever results are unpopular.[0] Simple manual interventions are often sufficient to nudge community behaviour so that majority outcomes broadly align with the moderators’ priors, without the visibility or accountability costs of a more complex system.

[0] Case in point being X. People routinely accuse the new management of "juicing" the algorithm to favour their politics, when outcomes are adequately explained by the exodus of contributors on the other side. Isolating innate community bias from algorithms is a philosophically impossible problem.

It's not 'downvote abuse' if it's working exactly as intended. The community decides what's 'perfectly fine and neutral.' If your comments follow the guidelines, at least they won't get deleted.

When I review the link posted by @dang it says talking about downvotes is boring. Maybe that's why your comment is grey. (This comment should turn grey as well)