Is there a problem with HN? | Hacker News Reader

Is there a problem with HN?

8 pointsAmerican_Pie10 comments

I have been coming here for over a year. One time there was a thread about a topic I was familiar with. I posted a comment and people down voted it. I posted links proving my point and the majority down voted it. So that left me with negative teens. I posted the truth but it was unpopular here. Once you have negative numbers it looks like its impossible to get out because your replies are hidden. So we exclude people who we don't agree with. We shut them out. This is not the America I grew up in. Its a sad commentary on USA. I see it in other systems. These are American dominated systems that exclude people unless they are like us. Some even ban foreign IP address. Maybe its a trade war. Maybe its an elitist attitude, I don't know. But it is ugly. Perhaps its the new ugly American.

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It's been my experience that the community downvotes the following fairly mercilessly:

- comments critical of Google

- comments praising the chinese government

- comments advocating a vegan lifestyle

- comments critical of Joel Spolsky

- comments that disagree with PG in the same thread and that seem not to have been well thought out.

- comments critical of the Gates Foundation

- comments advising young hackers not to attend college

- comments containing the word "bro"

I'm going to hazard a guess here since you mentioned vaccines. Was your comment something along the lines of vaccines causing autism or some other problem, that hasn't been scientifically proven? I've seen several examples of anti-vaccine comments being downvoted. Here's an example of a vaccine thread where numerous comments have been downvoted:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2182852

If your comment went against a generally accepted viewpoint and you tried to use links to pseudoscientific sources to back it up, then yes, you'd run afoul of most people here and be downvoted. The bad science surrounding this issue is a particular pet peeve of many people. You say "I posted links proving my point" which leads me to believe that maybe you're very set in a viewpoint that most people don't find credible.

Of course, since I don't know what your original comment was, this is all speculation.

That particular thread sounds like it fell apart, but I hope you contribute to other discussions anyway (though maybe a new account is required). Losing points happens occasionally, but it isn't the trend.

Keep in mind that although some comments don't really deserve to be negative, most of them really do. It's reasonable for the site to set a standard for quality and save readers' time by graying out things that are probably not worth the time to read. It won't be perfect.

There are also different shades of gray in comments. A comment at -3 is still a "readable" gray, and I've been known to bump comments back up if they contribute usefully to the discussion. But that's just one vote, putting it back to -2, which will still be below many people's thresholds. Sometimes not enough people bother to join in to "rescue" a reasonable comment; it happens, it's unfortunate, but that's how it goes.

Really the only way to fix these things is to post in "Feature Requests" at the bottom of the page with your ideas for what would make a better critique system. For instance, maybe it should become harder to downvote and require a reason, e.g. flame/inaccurate/whatever.

I browse with Showdead: yes and it seems that quite a number of contributors (natch ~0.01%?) have been caught by this, have had their comments downvoted to get their karma into the negative. There are spammers that this happens to yes, but also quite a few "normal" people who might not have had the HN worldview on an early comment and then continue contributing without realizing or being shown that their comments are being marked dead and don't show to almost all viewers.

I would make a new account, make a few vanilla comments that people will agree with and get karma to 10-30 to prevent this from happening.

I've seen some number of people with reasonable contributions who appear to be caught unaware by this for months or perhaps a year in some cases. I'd consider it a defect, but ? I see it more often on normal folks than spammers maybe 80/20

There are other situations where I am confused by seeing a normal contributor's comment as dead (different than deleted) out of the blue, they have +karma and won't post dead in the future.

I am certainly no social.media.community digerati though, it may work best over all.

>These are American dominated systems that exclude people unless they are like us.

TBH on the whole HN doesn't strike me as US-centric. Let me qualify that. It is, but far less than other similar sites and seems to me to have quite a cadre of people from across the globe.

You can always setup a new account and start from zero. It's kinda like going bankrupt, that's the American way.

The Elitists are Elite. Only a few of them, if you even suggest anything that is not inline with there views about HN You get ALL of them crashing down on you. It might be a small number but it seems those people are the quickest.

It would be nice if you had to make a little comment about why you downvoted?

It was about the dangers of vaccines. BTW Japan has stopped some vaccines because some children died. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/07/us-japan-vaccine-i... The article says their not sure it was the vaccine. But 3 of the 4 died the next day.

I haven't read the comment that was downvoted, but my understanding was that it was the brand of vaccine that was stopped, and not the vaccine itself. Anti-vaccine talk is not nearly as common in Japan as in North America.

It's interesting, because sites like HN shows the problems with having a purely democratic system.

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