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I might go a step further. I downvote anyone who uses broad brush strokes especially when using traits like race, sex, gender, political ideology, etc... These days that ends up meaning if you are anyone who takes and espouses a strong political cultural leaning, you get my downvote. Anything that's bad faith, like complaining someone has a perspective of "both sides" immediately gets a downvote. I have voted independent since I could vote and constantly having these camps attack me for my unique perspective and life experiences has taken its toll on that way.

I've been all around the world by now and I've realized people are rarely what you think they are. Even when you can point to stated political ideologies, I've argued and debated with enough people to know that the box almost never fits. I can judge your comments at point in time, but I've often found myself scrolling someone's post history on here and saying, "They're not so bad, they just lack perspective or experiences in this area." It's also possible they've had overwhelmingly negative experiences in that area, but a bad opinion nonetheless gets a downvote.

The whole point is I can rarely bring myself to judge a person as a whole. That takes some overwhelming information about them for me to do. I can judge individual criterion and that's exactly what the downvote gets used for on this account. I don't expect people to change and I don't really expect my fraction of an opinion to matter much.

I think we all want to have every explanation neatly "packaged" and settled but the truth is there are 1000 reasons for someone to do or say something and 1000 reasons to misinterpret each. When I was younger my go-to explanation was that any aggression is because of a certain class I was part of (read: gender, race, nationality, religion, etc.). It took me a while to realize that while people can always use a reason to act the way they do, they don't actually need that reason. The advent of the internet just made it easier to see this and to do it.

One of my comments on HN was repeatedly downvoted for saying something like "I don't use more than a bit of a particular ingredient in food because it gives me a throat burn".

This makes you realize sometimes a downvote is just "because". In someone's mind anything can trigger a "penalize" response towards the comment or the author. But I'm fairly certain most times guesses for the reason are very likely to be wrong.

Well said.

> I wish there were a word that meant simultaneously misogynist and/or misandrist

You mean “sexist”?

Misanthrope is sometimes the correct word for what I'm talking about.

But have an upvote.

I don't want to be nitpicky but I am sorry I have to be: Is that feeling not better expressed by "misanthrope"?

Misanthropy is more generalized. And even a misanthrope will engage with people of the opposite sex in lively (though, IME, very depressing) debates, and even be respectful within that context. Many misanthropes I've known will even respect people who are well-educated or otherwise "successful" (by some measure). Most sexists won't. Similar to racists.

Misogyny: women bug me

Misandry: men bug me

Misanthrope: people bug me

Indeed. We lack all the delicate little signals of disapproval here, the sighs, eyerolls, refusal to make eye contact, edging away. All we have are the two reward/punishment levers for our fellow rats in the cage.

Indeed, not only do we get more and gentler feedback in real-life, but we get more-on-point feedback than the downvote. We have cues for boredom, skepticism, annoyance, confusion.

Of course then again, all of this body-language pales in comparison to a well-written response.

Well, if you want to take sex out of it entirely, misanthropic has served well enough for centuries. If you wish to just say dislike of a sex without specifying which, well I'd have to punt and let the classicists come up with something.

Personally I rarely downvote posts as I believe everyone has the right to be heard and the implementation of downvoting on HN is tanamount to censhorship. I feel upvoting alone does the job well. On these rare occasions where I downvote a post, I feel I really owe it to the person to explain why.

I don't generally use the downvote button to express disagreement, but I do use it to say "Yeah, this is a violation of the rules and not cool and doesn't belong here."

And if it's egregious enough, I will flag it.

As someone who is a demographic outlier, I'm okay with getting downvotes as part of the feedback mechanism for trying to figure out how to navigate this social space. I think it's problematic to err too far in the direction of "Everyone needs to be nicey-nice to everyone all the time, no matter what they really think or feel about it."

FWIW I value your input as an outlier; you nearly always have something interesting and different to say, whereas for many posts half of the arguments are traditional, predictable and stale.

" to let very different people "say" things like "Wow. I think you are stupid because I'm a racist/misogynist/classist asshole and the way you said it tells me you are the wrong color/a woman/poor."

Funny, because I see it more often as "I think you are stupid because you have an opinion which I don't agree with and has triggered me due to my hypersensitivity, assumption of ill will, and inability to handle issues which may require nuance which my ideology won't allow for, which therefore causes me to suppress you"

I see overt racism (or even 'classism' or misogyny) on HN very, very rarely, certainly not remotely common enough so as to be a primary impetus for down-voting.

Edit: as an exercise in reality, I'd urge anyone interested to have a cruise through top, say 100 current threads, and point out the examples of misogyny/racism/classicism, or at least this as a basis for voting patterns.

triggered me due to my hypersensitivity, assumption of ill will, and inability to handle issues which may require nuance

That's often part and parcel of things like racism and sexism. Most such things do not get openly painted as "I don't like you because of your skin color or gender."

Metafilter is a great example of this. When I was there, it was not only a cesspit of ugly classism, it was horribly misandrist in ways that I found just pure evil.

But of course no one there described themselves as misandrist. They described themselves in amazingly wonderful and glowing terms as woke, pro women's lib, welcoming of the LGBTQ community, etc.

But rather than being pro women or something, it was mostly a space where it was okay for women and the LGBTQ crowd to be openly hateful to men.

One guy posted a question asking for support to help him cope in the aftermath of his wife's rape and one of the comments nailed him to the wall for supposedly "making this about him" because of him seeking support for himself separately from and in addition to supporting her recovery from this awful incident.

I left a long and helpful comment that moderating staff deleted and when I asked why, I was told it was "tangential" and "not providing resources" -- a test not applied to the long comment handing him his head for seeking support on the grounds that he was clearly some misogynistic piece of shit of a human being who only treated his wife as a sex object, clearly, as that could be the only possible reason he would ask such a question.

I kept a copy of my comment and posted it on a blog of mine in hopes he would find it somehow. He messaged me a few hours later and was very thankful for what I had to say on the topic because the comment handing him his head for asking the question (which had like 80 "likes") had him just losing his shit. It was a poisonous message delivered by people who simply hate all heterosexual men and I just don't know why any men participate on that site, it's so openly hostile to men. Meanwhile, a lot of them parrot the party line about it being all woke and wonderfulness.

Being openly hateful to men is not and never will be pro women's rights. Kicking the shit out of men does not redress the lack of status for women. Kicking the shit out of heterosexual men for the crime of being in a hetero relationship does not make the world a better place for the LGBTQ crowd.

What helps them is...helping them. Weird as that may sound. That's what helps them.

And it's a shockingly hard message to try to get across. About 99 percent of the time people seem to think "I know! The answer is: let's find some man to lynch!" when what I would like to see is, oh, more money in my bank account or something.

Me watching men get lynched doesn't fill my belly.

I fully respect that racism and sexism exist, that sometimes people and groups may not be fully aware of their insensitivity, and would never deny anyone's real material victimhood.

However ...

... the default characterization of a system or group of people as being 'sexist or racist' because they may 'downvote' something, or may not agree with a specific statement of social or moral justice ... just isn't right.

HN just isn't a racist or sexist system.

Contentious statements regarding race/gender aren't really that common, moreover, when they are it seems to me that discussions are generally well within the bounds of civility and at worst, there might be some misguided ignorance.

I don't for a second doubt people (such as yourself) have a really crap experience now and again - and there's no excusing that (there's no reason for people to have to put up with that kind of crap) but I don't think it's very representative of the system, or a problem with the culture or moderation for example.

HN just isn't a racist or sexist system.

That's debatable, but there's probably nothing to be gained by debating it here and now.

It is the least worst thing I know in that regard, which is one of the reasons I hang here.

But my firsthand experience over the course of more than 11 years suggests that, yes, sexism is an issue here, though it certainly isn't overt. The fact that it is subtler than usual actually makes it harder to root out.

Another reason I hang here is "I'm too truthful to be good." and people here are willing to tolerate that personality defect. Unlike Metafilter and some other forums, I haven't (yet) been banned for sometimes pointing out what I see when I'm sufficiently fed up and cranky and having a bad day and unable to keep erring on the side of giving people credit for their many virtues and I, thus, feel compelled to say something like "...and, yet, I remain dirt fucking poor and no amount of virtue on my part of adding value or some shit -- like people say I should -- ever seems to remedy that."

To be clear, I count it as a tremendous virtue that so many people here are willing to tolerate my presence in spite of me being too truthful to be good. It gives me hope that HN will be the space in which the internet figures out how to do things better, in spite of all of us being human and having inherited so much awful crap from the past and the inherent challenges involved in redressing large-scale social injustices.

I don't really care to discuss this further at the moment. I hope you have a great day in spite of making the egregious mistake of having spoken to me.

You can disable the downvotes with any decent ad blocker.