It just occurs to me now that the mass downvote of your post demonstrates a possible flaw with a major reason for downvoting things.

Many people will say something like "I downvoted it because I don't want to see posts like this on lesswrong." Lets call the people who believe something like this about downvotes class A.

If the majority of downvoting is class A, then once a post had been downvoted to -5 or maybe -10, you would expect it to gather no more downvotes. After all, class A people are using downvotes to signal things they don't want to see. At some number of downvotes, the signal is made with high reliability, and if class A people are rational they will not bother looking at the post knowing with high likelihood it is a post they don't want to see. And so there will be no additional class A downvotes past some significant number, perhaps 10 downvotes.

But in fact what we see is more than 200 downvotes. AndyWood is currently down 247 in the recent month, I checked his score perhaps 2 days ago and it was much higher. So despite an overwhelmingly clear signal that this is a post that class A people don't want to see, we continue to have people who will downvote this post opening it and downvoting not only this post but many of AndyWOod's comments in the comment thread of the post.

I don't think one can escape the conclusion that the reason for the massive downvoting is not the "class A" reason. It is not because this is a post people don't want to see. Or at least if it is, the suggestion that downvoting a post signals to people that this is a post they don't want to see and therefore that they will, if rational, choose not to look at, is incorrect.

Perhaps an objection to my conclusion could be raised, "as a responsible Class A citizen, when I see an undesirable post I run towards it to help my fellow class A citizens properly signal its nature." Well this would seem to demonstrate the futility of class A thinking: a heavily downvoted post becomes a post that people WANT to see so they can demonstrate good citizenship by helping signal it as a post people won't want to see.