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Comment by mwill | Hacker News Reader

This is incredible curious, an upvoted post where (at the time of my comment) every top level comment is downvoted, possibly the most polarizing post I've ever seen on HN

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Shouldn't be a surprise, as private property (and keeping the government/all other parties out of it) is one of the fundamental tenets of the U.S. Constitution. And so a lot of people come with that mindset.

It's a double-edged sword, and while I agree with a lot of the points in the article (it's one of the primary reasons why Europe is unbelievably pleasant to visit), the US will never implement anything remotely close to free-to-roam (or whatever it's called in the UK, as an analog) policies. Too many private interests against it.

Private property is fundamental, but preventing people from traversing across private private property seemed to have morphed from being no big deal into a much bigger offense over the last century. Or at least that is my understanding.

> When you trespass, you are striking a blow against hierarchy and capitalism and uptight motherfuckers everywhere.

I think the controversy comes from the authors overall tone. Quotes like this make them sound like an edgy teenager

I bet the more populated the US gets the more desire will be there for right to roam. Or at least I hope so. The same with billionaires cutting off access to public beaches.

As one of the posters of a TLC, I can tell you that the scores of all my posts are going up and down like a yoyo.

Or it might be spiking up at irregular intervals then steadily decreasing over time. I haven't instrumented.

It's a recent phenomenon as far as I can tell. Within the last few months or so, every comment I post (especially at the top level) gets immediately, sometimes within seconds, downvoted to -1 or -2, then throughout the day stabilizes back up to some equilibrium value. I also wonder what the cause is.

Sounds like someone may be downvote-botting you. Or just brigading. You might report it to HN.

I've definitely seen the latter recently. Last week there was a post about Snopes' current legal troubles, and an argument started about whether Snopes was politically neutral or not. For the first hour or so, everyone who implied that Snopes was anything but rabidly left-wing was downvoted well into the grey, then mostly rose back up with time. It very much looked like someone had multiple accounts, or multiple friends with accounts, and was downvote-bombing everyone who disagreed with them.

Maybe it's just that people have strong opinions and/or feel lightly triggered for some topics?

(Also TLC here; and no, did not downvote you:P)

In isolation, that's very possible. In practice, like ryandrake, I've been seeing comments on certain topics get mass-downvoted almost immediately and then slowly trend back upward. If it was just that HN readers in general disagree with me, I wouldn't expect such an identifiable and repeating pattern.

(Also, TLC?)

top level comment is my guess

yes

I’m glad to hear it’s not only me. I used to get powerful amounts of upvotes on my comments when well written, but lately I’ve been seeing my votes swing wildly all the way from -4 to back in the positives. I just don’t get it, and I wish Hackernews had a way to see the full voting activity on comments. As of now, I’m going to assume there’s vote fraud going on.

Interesting. I notice a similar pattern on some off my posts.

Not that it explains the instant down-votes or the "say one controversial thing and get everything else you've said in the past 24hr down-voted" phenomena but I used to run a script to track when I got up-voted/down-voted and the TL;DR of the data is that up-votes happen slowly around the clock and down-votes roll in when people show up to work and at lunchtime in HN's two most popular time zones (EST and PST).

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