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Comment by xstartup | Hacker News Reader

I've stopped posting interesting comments because I get downvoted just because my opinion is different.

Lately, I began to feel HN is full of people who sell their time. They just can't believe that anyone might be willing to work for free. Here is the evidence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16400111 Albeit, it's not enough to draw this kind of conclusion.

See this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16391332

Here I simply asked for people's opinion of the experience on different platforms.

From now I'll just read and rarely post. My work area is ad tech and people here seem not like ads much and will downvote/ignore ad tech questions.

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My perception is that downvoting has increased. I often upvote downvoted comments that are perfectly reasonable, though I might disagree with them (or simply not care much), because downvoting can alienate folk from commenting – I've had that before myself – and I want to read the best content.

re ads: I hate them, but I would only contemplate downvoting someone claiming that the internet would die without them – the whole entitlement to push them to my eyeballs thing – unless the comment cited evidence.

Most of the downvotes that most people on HN will receive simply mean: "I sure hope that isn't true." (Even though you've cited a peer-reviewed journal and they've got nothing but hope.) So the more novel and significant the contribution, the better the chance of being downvoted into oblivion, in my experience.

But keep commenting, some will read it and knowledge that challenges prejudice (prejudgments) always spreads quite slowly at first. Then later nearly everybody convince themselves they've ever believed anything else.

Note that the above is true for most contributors, but most downvotes on the site are directed at a small minority of people who commonly comment without reading the article, or didn't understand it, or blunder through general ignorance or profound bias; so most downvotes are still legit.

Well, why care about downvotes? Maybe 20 people read it and are glad you wrote it, 1-2 people downvote. Don't let that stop you.

I've put more thought into the strange ratings of movies on IMDb. There are many reasons for this, but one is - it seems the, er, less discerning movie-goers tend to do more voting. Many people never vote. Just that alone means the crap movies get more and often higher votes. Similarly with music topping the charts. But on IMDb the voting's not everything. There are user comments where you can have your say. People know the movie ratings are often silly.

p.s. Do people anywhere like ads much? People in advertising aside perhaps.

I'm out because there is zero accountability for downvotes, they are completely anonymous.

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