I don't think of HN as a place to initiate a discussion or ask a question. I've contributed two items which never got any visibility or responses. But, I'm fine with contributing to a thread that makes it to the first few pages if I think I have something to say.
HN isn't a good place for discussion in my opinion due to the (explicitly allowed) practice of downvoting comments you don't agree with.
If you'll be penalized for saying something people disagree with, you won't say it, or you'll say it and I'll be downvoted until it's hidden. This leads to HN threads usually being dominated with a few majority opinions and any real discussion being killed-off or buried.
This is basically the same as Reddit. If you want real discussion you often need to sort by controversial.
I'm still coming up to speed on downvoting. The down arrows appeared for me suddenly a couple of weeks ago but not for every post.
At least for now I find them useful. I have read a lot of grayed posts to get a feeling for what's going on and usually see why. I've upvoted a few where I thought the author was on point.
One quirk about HN is that if you complain about the downvotes, you'll get even more. The community does seem to treat karma as the truly imaginary internet points they are.
Descendance into the underworld occurs when the goal becomes to embrace the highest negative score as it will put the comment at the bottom extreme of the thread and neither get lost in the middle nor marked at the top of the groupthink. If down votes were to serve the purpose of hiding less useful comments, then it would be more appropriate to style the comments with colors associated with a light/dark theme and not mess with chronological order, but that would likely set off the anti-gay crowd. As an aside, the temperature is more constant further from searing gazes. Just don't get flagged as that calls the terminator hounds.
