Tell HN: Good comments get voted down regularly | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Good comments get voted down regularly

4 pointsandrewtbham7 comments

I recently had a comment down voted and i was very surprised, because i know about the topic.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2557647

here is another example of an accurate, interesting comment, from the same thread by someone else that was downvoted.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2557599

1) I encourage more people to cut on showdead and judge for yourself.

2) I think there needs to be more accountability in downvoting. they need to state a reason or show us who it was... or something. i suspect people have ulterior motives for downvoting.

Edit: My comment has been voted up since I posted.

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Specifically neither of your example posts demonstrates knowledge of the topic because you provide only a basic answer unsupported by relevant details, rationales or examples.

Whenever you believe that your comments contained insightful and relevant contributions to the discussion, consider the downvotes as a response to your choice of language, a lack of logical continuity, poor writing mechanics, or a general failure to make your point clearly and in keeping with the HN community's expectations.

In other words, consider downvotes of your good ideas as constructive feedback and edit your work to be consistent with community goals.

Your second example includes 'M$' which is a rather childish and antagonistic way to abbreviate. The tone of the first comment seems to be a little immature as well.

I'm not trying to have a go at you personally, but I've found HN to be a community that generally values mature behaviour, and rewards/discourages with karma.

i appreciate the feedback, and that does makes some sense.

If I had the ability to downvote, "M$" would be an automatic downvote regardless of the rest of the content.

Neither of these are good comments. They aren't interesting or insightful. They are also written in a childish manner that is not normally accepted on this site or in the professional hacker community (except perhaps on IRC).

In my opinion, down voting works just fine and complaining about it usually makes the author look even worse than the original comments may have.

I agree, M$ is immature and antagonistic.

I don't understand how the other part of the comment is not interesting. Plenty of fish, is as far as I know, the only good example of a consumer startup that has huge traction (besides Microsoft's own sites). I think that's interesting and would be interested to know if there are any more, which might have come up if the thread wasn't downvoted.

Actually my comment was later upvoted. I'm not complaining, so much as trying to understand.

I defer to the site founder on all issues of site governance. I have found HN largely to be a worthwhile website for my 911 days as a registered user, and my interest is mostly to make sure that the site founder and the members of his volunteer editor ("curator") team

http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

continue to enjoy the site and find it useful for themselves. They are doing a good job, and I want them to have incentive to keep up the good work.

When pg wrote his recent post "Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696

He wrote, "The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted."

That's still the key issue. Anything that results in lower scores for mean, dumb, or other bad comments is something helpful to all readers of HN.

It looks like you have received an explanation from a couple of other participants about why the comments you asked about, as posted, can look either mean or dumb (or both) even if they are factually correct. That is the art of posting here, to post with correct information, a civil tone, and thoughtful use of language. It's kind of other participants to suggest some ways to improve those posts. Usually people just downvote (or upvote) to indicate their judgment of post quality. It happens that I didn't read that thread originally at all, so I am still digesting the context of the comments you asked about.

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