Ask HN: What's the ghost behind the downvotes?

I think your spelling correction was downvoted because it contained a spelling error and because you came off rather paternalizing.

Humor in general is downvoted on HN, especially one liners unless they're really good.

Don't take it personal.

you came off rather paternalizing

Did you mean patronizing?

Doesn't it mean 'to talk to someone as though you're their dad' in English?

That's what I meant.

Paternalizing: disregarding people's freedom and responsibility under guise and pretense of knowing what would be good and proper for them.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/paternalize

Patronizing: Treat as inferior unduly, talk down to, treat condescendingly.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/patronize

From that first link:

> to place in a fatherly role.

That's what I had in mind.

Specifically this bit:

"Please spell people. This is not SMS!"

Which (of course) also contains a grammar error.

to place in a fatherly role

That's still the incorrect use of the word, and I don't care if I get downvoted again. Paternalizing refers to the act of treating someone like a father (e.g. "After the death of his father, Bobby grew to paternalize his older brother").

Ah, I get you now, so it's the reverse, someone is not paternalizing when they treat you as though they are your father ,but you are paternalizing if you treat someone as though they are your father, is that what you're saying?

The idiomatic usage you want here is "paternalistic", e.g. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/paternalistic

That said, when you used "paternalizing" what you meant was crystal clear to me.

I just hope Karma on HN is just not a function of how cool, popular or otherwise consensual you are and that people like myself can stay on and bloom with differing styles and views from the majority

You can search and find plenty of examples of people who have become dissatisfied with the way that Hacker News has gone downhill from where it was a few months or years ago. There has been a tendency in recent months to downvote people who disagree with you, or point out flaws in your logic.

Just last year, you would only see downvotes for Digg-style zingers or insensitive comments. Nowadays, you'll get downvoted for persuasive arguments just because people don't agree with you. And there's no humor at all allowed anymore. Just the same old stories day after day (look what Apple announced, look what Arrington said, Rate My Startup, How can I scale my app, should I learn Ruby?), and a lot of people arguing about who said what about startups instead of actually starting companies. I think it's time I started reading HN less and coding more...at least my commits don't get downvoted.

My impression is that pointing out a typo doesn't further the conversation unless the typo completely alters the meaning of the comment.

As well dyslexia, is a common problem among right brained people there are a good deal of right brained designers and developers. dyslexia is something that they cannot get rid of, they can work to improve it but it cannot be "cured". Highlighting it can be taken as being an ass to someone with a disability. The problem is in all other matters they are intelligent so many are extremely embarrassed of their inability to spell or put sentences together in proper order as they know individuals will use it to detract from their message. To knit pick their spelling can be misconstrued as an attempt to discredit their argument based on a technicality.

I think you mean "nitpick" rather than "knit pick".

You know I have refrained from the whole HN is going to hell, but to get downvoted for trying to explain a viewpoint that hey he might have gotten downvoted by a dyslexic who took it personal (something I have learned to refrain from doing, by seeing the error of my defensive thinking) and then to have a troll try to get his +5 funny quota (wrong site sir), at the expense of my affliction. Knowing full well that yes I do suffer from the affliction is reprehensible. You sir have reached a new low for this community. It is people like you that make me feel the fool for defending the community of people here to have an intelligent discussion.

I accidentally down voted you on this. 100% unintentional. I wish there was a way of reversing it.

Don't worry about it, the karma does not mean much to me. I am here for valuable discussion so long as I have enough karma to participate in the community it is no big deal. My gripe above was more the principal of the matter than the actual loss of points.

I take the approach that HN conversations are for a very wide audience, so signal-to-noise ratio is important. Chatty comments, which may be fine in smaller forums where people know each other better, end up just looking like extra noise here. I like comments that add to the discussion and aren't gratuitously argumentative.

Comments on spelling are only productive when spelling errors actually make it significantly harder to understand something. This wasn't the case with the message you commented on.

Don't worry about it. You have got fans. People got downvoted plenty of times for perfectly fine comments. And there're voting cliches which colluded here that were discovered before.

Realize that people here are not your friends or your family. You don't need acceptance or approval from them. Just be yourself and don't give a fuck. Also don't take karma too seriously. It's part of the game mechanic of a social site to make people comment and submit.

>> "...but I can add value I think."

I think that's the point. The comment about the spelling mistake didn't add any value to the discussion. It was distracting and a little rude.

As to why yours was downvoted while others' similar comments weren't: I guess it's a bit random. Sometimes I'll downvote that sort of comment, sometimes I won't. But it's never based on username.

Why do you care? (serious question)

First of all, thanks for all the great comments back. I had hoped to get this sort of input and since I have been involved with HN, I had failed to get a sense of what the informal tone and etiquette truly is. I think you all have enlightened me a bit here. As for dfhrtjhf's question above: I just care because I love many of the contributions of HNers I read here every week and I want to contribute something back to this community for that very reason. Does that answer your question?

"...feel bad that my comments were seen as problematic.."

Refreshing attitude for a message board. You should stay on, keep posting.