What ruins HN for me is that people downvote for disagreement. The rules, last I checked, forbid that --- downvotes are for poor behavior, not because you disagree.
I've not seen any evidence that downvoting patterns have changed on HN in recent years, and the rules haven't changed either. If the community is being ruined, something else must be doing it.
Honestly I'm kind of baffled by (what I assume) is the moderation teams' stance on downvotes. I see so many seemingly reasonable comments with "edit: why am I being downvoted into oblivion". I'm not saying the site is ruined, but I can easily ask: how is that productive?
The whole point of having a downvote system is to correct people towards more productive behavior, no? If people don't know what they said wrong, how can they fix it?
If the the user can't figure out why they're being punished, and someone like me who has been on this site for a long time and is also going "why on earth did that get downvoted", then what purpose does it serve other than as a public flogging device?
Then again, considering that the site design hasn't changed to even have a up-vote button that works on mobile, I'm not exactly holding my breath that anything here could ever change.
