It's even worse than that. People are all too often willing to "flag for disagree". It's getting to be pretty common to see threads with comments that are [flagged][dead] which don't break the rules in any way, but merely express a view which is unpopular. Sometimes I even agree that it's a stupid position to take up, but that doesn't merit being flagged to death. I always vouch for those comments but it feels like an exercise in futility with so many people using the flag function as a "super fuck you" button.

Personally I would remove the downvote button entierly because apparently it is a lossy projection of an at least three-dimensional vector: agreement, quality, truth. Graying out text so it is no longer readable is a censoring measure not justified in most cases I encounter on HN in the eight years I'm here.