It doesn't affect my writing but it does affect what I think of people here. The more downvotes to negative values I see, the more I think this community is becoming less able or willing to communicate.

Intelligent people should be able to use words to disagree. I see how it can be useful to use upvotes for content filtering, but downvoting to negative scores actually highlights those posts and therefore defeats the content filtering purpose.

Greying them out even forces me to take action (highlight the text with the mouse) in order to be able to read them. It's completely counter-productive.

So what purpose do downvotes have? In my view they are either insults or they are a very primitve way of expressing opinion. Upvotes are also a very primitive way of expressing opinion, but they help me filter out interesting content as well.

Since negative scores serve no purpose at all, why would I want to have those posts thrust in my face? To learn that there are a bunch of speechless people who feel good about making a score go from -8 to -9? I already knew that, thank you very much.

I wish there was an account setting that makes all comment scores go away.