I've recently had copious amounts of free time to catch up on everything, and when I logged back into HN I discovered my priviledges on the site had been rather severly curtailed.
My best guess is I've been pigeon-holed as a "troll" because some of my comments diverge from the hive-mind that used to -- and possibly still does -- make up the majority of the contributors to HN.
Just because I don't buy into the HN group-think doesn't mean I'm a troll, or that my opinion (read as: downvote) has no merit.
I haven't really wanted to downvote anything I've seen in the past nine months, but I feel a recent posting merits my downvote... but that's apparently not an option that's available to me.
Dunno. Maybe things have changed around here. But if I'm a long-time verified user of this site I would hope that my opinion -- even if it's a negative one -- would carry some kind of weight.