I see where billme is coming from. I don't do it here (because I don't comment much, because I mostly use https://hackerweb.app for reading), but I do it on reddit.
Once you've left enough comments, a motivated party has a good chance of identifying you based on the intersection of your (relatively uncommon) interests, various bits and pieces of the personal info that you tend to drop in comments etc.
I don't know who you are but please stay! You seem to have a lot to offer and in a very positive way.
EDIT:
When I wrote this reply your comment was at the top. 2 minutes later it was at the bottom of the comment section.
Looks like it was manually moved to the bottom of the comments by a moderator :(
Downvotes per item are limited to -4 and the signal-to-noise ratio for negative votes beyond pushing them below the “new comment” boost is of little positive impact in filtering content, in my opinion.
And yes, there a lot of filters in place for upvotes, many of which are intentionally kept secret.
“Not a user yet? Signup is by invitation only to combat spam and increase accountability. If you know a current user of the site [1], ask them for an invitation or request one in chat [2].”
My experience is the post without URLs, but say 10 upvotes are generally of lower quality than URL related posts with 10 upvotes. Not sure why this is, but I was forced to speculate, URL post intend tend to be by an expert on a topic and while non-URL post tend to be seeking experts; again, just speculation, might be wrong.
Yes, there’s a lot more upside to comments as a result.
Generally voting signal to noise ratio goes: upvote, no-vote, downvote — allowing more downvote would most like have more negative than positive impact on the community.
Dang (HN’s mod) just asked me to be identifiable and given that’s not a good fit for me, this will be my last post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23441542