Why do people downmod Jason's post? Disagreeing is not a reason for downmodding. I was interested in his response, whatever it might be. I want to judge for myself.
Give the guy some credit for showing up in front of the firing squad and trying to defend himself.
Or we can turn this into a complete echo chamber where we can all bad-mouth Jason in absentia.
Some people don't like lies, other people don't like off-topic posts, other people don't like fallacies, and other people just don't have time to write a disagreement post ... especially if the assertions made in the down-voted comment aren't worth bothering with.
And if down-voting should have a purpose ... then it should definitely be for filtering out people not in HN's demographic.
That might be true for people who want to use HN to talk about politics or religion, but Jason is definitely in our demographic. He's a web startup founder, whether or not his startup sucks.
1) In the case of obvious trolling or idiocy, e.g. "lol your mom sucks" or "ur dumb", downvoting below zero is warranted because those comments are stuff that we don't want to see at all.
2) In the case of everything else, downvoting is warranted, imho, only when something has been upvoted beyond where it should be. For example, if Jason's posts were at 50 upvotes, I would downvote them, because that's totally unwarranted. In this case, I'd downvote them even at 10 points... they're relevant because of who he is and how he's connected to this, but not that insightful.
Basically, for all non-troll posts, you should upvote/downvote based on whether you feel the post has the points it deserves, and generally never downvote below zero.
In this case, Jason, although controversial, is not an obvious stupid troll - he's responding to points that people are making. I would like to see his posts somewhere between 1 and 5 points, rather than at -4.
I actually end up upvoting a lot of <1 point comments, even ones I disagree with. If the comment is reasonably coherent and not trolling, it usually shouldn't be below 1.
I guess since there are no explicit references in the HN guidelines it's up to each user to make his or her mind up themselves.
For me, changing a statement like this is pretty close to lying and is probably worse than trolling.
How else would you indicate strong disagreement with a comment given the HN culture of well thought out replies and a zero cost binary device for weighing in on an issue, when you have nothing else to contribute other than "I disagree"/"I do not like your post"?
For instance, I upvoted Calcanis' comment (to rescue it from negative number territory) and upvoted the people who pointed out the insincerity / inconsistency. Both kinds of posts advanced the general knowledge.
I didn't have to upvote the more personal attacks on Calcanis. But it did feel pretty good. ;)
there are a group of them who down vote everything i post... doesn't matter how insightful... TEN DOWN VOTES!!
it's kind of funny.
there are a group of them who down vote everything i post... doesn't matter how insightful...
I don't have much experience in the industry other than reading a few blogs and even I could not spot any insights in most of your past comments in HN (especially the ones from the SEOmoz debate).
Anyway, I've got more important things to attend to at 1AM than Daniel extortion plot fall out.
Really? This is enough to piss off anyone who read it. As far as I can understand you forwarded a private email. You have more important things to do than attending to things you screwed up? I can't understand what is so insightful in that.
(Good that you apologized to Daniel. Kudos)
Just a simple apology would probably have been your best bet. Everyone makes mistakes. Best not to lash out at the people you've already harmed.
If you look at your comment history, this is not true. Some people are down voting you extensively in this thread, this is not true for the whole community or even for your comments outside this thread.