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Comment by akulbe | Hacker News Reader

Always love getting downvoted for asking a legitimate question. Nice.

Correct strategy in the case of early down votes that you think are incorrect is (1) review what you wrote to see if its tone was flame-bait; (2) wait it out quietly until votes equilibrate. Usually something reasonable comes out over time.

Yeah, that seems like a better strategy than a salty comment, which almost always just gets downvoted too.

Meh, HN seems to hate questions when they think the questioner isn't genuine: Basically if they wish the answer weren't true. That's been my recent experience anyway.

Better suggestion - stop politicking and answer the question or move on.

Sure if the question is badly made then downvote it. Whilst downvote for disagreement is encouraged here (by the site owners) you can't "disagree" with a question, that's nonsensical.

Downvoting for disagreement is encouraged? That's news to me! Not welcome news either, because I like the idea that the "quality" of the comment matters more.

Personally, while I don't downvote for disagreement, I definitely will downvote (what I perceive as) disingenuous questions — There's more productive ways to express an opinion.

pg (the site's creator) once wrote that it's ok[1], and the current mods have cited that post recently[2], indicating it's still the policy.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17996858

I make a habit of commenting if I downvote, sure, the commenter might not like what I have to say but I feel I owe it to them to be as honest about why I felt they weren't contributing to the discussion.

To answer your question: "how can you disagree with a question"; well, you can downvote a question that is loaded (with some kind of ignorant agenda) or a question that is so blisteringly ignorant by itself that it is plain and obvious that the commenter didn't read the article posted, even a skim-read.

Downvotes just happen on HN, no need to let it upset you. I have a theory that some anarchists have bots running that just downvote new comments in an arbitrary pattern. You know, to keep things perfectly balanced, as all things should be. Similarly I wrote a Chrome extension that may or may not hide the top comment on any given HN post. Keeps you on your toes. https://github.com/sdegutis/PerfectlyBalancedHN

I actually wrote a script to track this and it's been running for a few months.

I generally post around 9am and 12pm US east coast time. When I take a substantial negative hit it's around noon or 3pm on the East coast. There's a baseline amount of up-votes and down-votes (with up-votes dominating) that seems to roughly correlate with the hours most people are awake in the US and Europe.

Someday I'm going to publish a write-up here.

What's the conclusion? Seems to me like it could be that it's near the end of the work day for most casual HN readers and they're cranky (low blood sugar from a standard American diet) so they downvote whatever they see?

Probably because the answer is obvious: AWS. Just do a "whois" on 3.0.0.0 and you'll see the contacts are for AWS EC2.

Truth hurts, that's why you get downvoted.

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