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Comment by pbhjpbhj | Hacker News Reader

>I try to learn from the downvotes I receive. I don't expect everyone to agree with me, but I expect myself to analyze my own behavior to figure out what really contributes to the community.

As downvotes don't differentiate between agreement and poor construction of argument how can you tell what contributes. I find that those who disagree with me in a well thought out way are instructive. I don't wish to homogenise with the community but want to know if I'm not expressing myself well.

For example, this comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1135803, I can't work out why it's downvoted. Thus I can't see what I could have done to improve the comment or why I should perhaps of not made it.

IMO we should have an agreement vote as well as a quality vote.

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I can't work out why it's downvoted

Probably because you wrote "Next they'll be telling us they don't proofread their title submissions, un-freaking-believable ;0)" as the opening sentence. The rest of the comment looks fine, but it leads off with language that sounds like LOL-speak. Too bad you got downvoted. But the downvotes give you something to learn from about how to express yourself when you are making a serious comment, as that comment mostly was.

I'll quote another reply to me elsewhere in this thread.

It is annoying to see a reasonable comment downvoted to 0, or less. I feel like I'm missing something and what I'm missing is an explanation. Why was the comment voted down?

Now what happened in the grandparent of this comment here is that another HN participant asked why a particular comment of his in another thread was downvoted. I kindly followed the link he provided, to see his comment for the first time. After reading that comment, I pondered his informational question in this thread about why that comment was downvoted. I don't know FOR SURE, because I had no role in downvoting that comment, and indeed wouldn't downvote that comment if I came upon it in a thread I was following actively. But I suggest to him one reason why somebody--unknown to me--might have thought to downvote that comment. Then I see that my own informational answer to his question was downvoted--for reasons not stated in this thread. There is some kind of signal here, but I sure hope that the signal is not "Don't answer informational questions posted by other participants."

The answer I gave above was a hypothesis based on previous comments I have seen with downvotes. But the hypothesis doesn't fit the answer itself being downvoted, which for all I know was simply drive-by downvoting.

>Too bad you got downvoted. But the downvotes give you something to learn from about how to express yourself when you are making a serious comment, as that comment mostly was.

Comes across as condescending and mildly offensive because of that. Probably why you got downvoted.

FWIW I think that the use of humour in identifying errors, particularly when coupled with information as in my representative comment, does not detract from the comment's worth. Indeed I find it hard not to find funny the errors in a piece which is all about pointing out a common error...

So people don't appreciate my sense of humour - was it really that terrible compared to the information that I forwarded?

The point still stands - you can assert that the reason is my terrible sense of humour (!) but I can't tell if that's true or not.

An agreement vote as well as a quality vote makes no sense to me. Trying to micromanage people's behavior doesn't usually turn out the way you intend. And besides, most people will just use both votes to express whatever general feeling they have about a post.

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