I'd argue ranking comments per se isn't the issue, it's whether the culture is preserved that encourages useful application of the voting system. Whether any community can preserve their desired culture is arguably the most important factor and it's what the grandparent post is essentially referring to.
On HN the main goal of upranking is if one comment is more interesting/informative than another (or as a group test to see how robust its argument is if the voter has no experience to judge directly). Downranking ime isn't meant to be the method used shift the order of comments but rather to discourage a post that doesn't fit the HN culture/guidelines. OTOH most popular gamified discussion systems don't discourage use of reactionary downvoting, which can creep into other posting cultures.
The problem the grandparent post raises is if signals that voting users would ordinarily use to shape the continued posting culture (eg: downranking comments that don't fit in tone/substance) aren't used like they were intended to be and if the guidelines discourage meta discussion then there isn't any other avenue to inform users what the desired culture should be in practice.
Certainly one can post non-meta comments showing what type of comments one would like (and thankfully for most strictly tech topics here it's still reasonable) but if the culture shifts enough among the silent voting users then the concern is this erodes the quality of discussion as the signals for what is wanted/not wanted get skewed.
On HN the main goal of upranking is if one comment is more interesting/informative than another (or as a group test to see how robust its argument is if the voter has no experience to judge directly). Downranking ime isn't meant to be the method used shift the order of comments but rather to discourage a post that doesn't fit the HN culture/guidelines. OTOH most popular gamified discussion systems don't discourage use of reactionary downvoting, which can creep into other posting cultures.
The problem the grandparent post raises is if signals that voting users would ordinarily use to shape the continued posting culture (eg: downranking comments that don't fit in tone/substance) aren't used like they were intended to be and if the guidelines discourage meta discussion then there isn't any other avenue to inform users what the desired culture should be in practice.
Certainly one can post non-meta comments showing what type of comments one would like (and thankfully for most strictly tech topics here it's still reasonable) but if the culture shifts enough among the silent voting users then the concern is this erodes the quality of discussion as the signals for what is wanted/not wanted get skewed.