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There may be a certain risk that downvoting culture replaces "comment and discussion" culture (at least at the margins). A reason for that may be that there is no clear idea of what a downvote (or an upvote) actually means, such that possibly some people just upvote if the content of a comment / post confirms their worldview (and vice versa).
Some hypotheses are not beliefs (they are beliefs-in-development that aren't yet ready for making predictions), and many constructions are not even hypotheses in this sense (they are not about the real world). I don't believe there is a unifying concept behind the things people talk about, different concepts are salient for different statements.
1Sherrinford
I don't think that contradicts my original statement strongly. The statement is itself a hypothesis, but I wrote it down because I find it likely that it describes behavior. However, I don't have a strong degree of confidence about it.
Some comments may not be in the worldview / belief category, and in this case it may be the case that the people I hypothesized about may just neither upvote nor downvote. It is also possible that in this case voting on posts or comments may be motivated by different things.
I don't think that contradicts my original statement strongly.
I don't think it contradicts it at all, it's unrelated to your original statement, only to the use of a word in it that can be steelmanned away in the obvious manner.