In my defense:
1) There's definitely an element of "if the user can’t find it, the feature doesn't exist" with downvoting here.
2) In practical terms, downvotes are so extraordinarily rare on HN that they almost don’t exist.
Anyway, I'm encouraged that downvotes exist on HN, but the threshold could be considered so absurdly high that they're nerfed into oblivion.
2) That's largely because few users make comments lame enough to be downvoted. But when they do, they get downvoted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507604