I see another comment on top doing the same. Why do people start with this? If you don't bother you should not even brought that up. Seems like an underhanded way of getting more points. Do people even fall for this?
Some of these memes become elevated into conscious actions. For instance, people cynically exploit "Linux can't do X" to get help for X. But some memes are unconscious and I think "I'll be downvoted for this" or "Get out of here with your facts and reason" or "Source?" are definitely examples of these.
Personally, I think many of the privacy and security comments are also memes that propagate through mimicry of success, but that's its own thing.
Any invitation to downvotes, I take. Any comment about downvotes, means at the least that I won't upvote that comment. Meta-comments about downvotes are exempt, I would probably upvote this comment if I saw it from someone else.
Every person who adopts this policy improves the discourse by discouraging this behavior, please consider it!
However, people wanting feedback beyond mere downvotes is legitimate and downvoting without comment is the actual wrong here IMO.
IMO the best scheme here is that you _must_ provide a reason to downvote. People who vote for your reason [ie they agree with you about downvoting the parent] should be the actual downvotes.
This way instead of apparently arbitrary downvotes one gets a list of reasons with scores (HNs score hiding aside, though they'd still be ordered) indicating their relative worth as reasons for downvoting.
That is actionable. Under K2I that would allow everyone to tailor their contents to the audience if they wished, or at least understand the audience's approbation.
tl;dr I downvoted you ;o) ... except I didn't because your comment has value even if I disagree !
Funny thing, when I went to quote the specific HN guideline, I'm almost certain it used to say "Please don't comment about downvotes. It never helps" or something very much like that.
But the current guideline says:
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
Which we're all in violation of! I'll do my best to follow this rule in the future.
So far I have reverted only once on HN.
According to OP's comment, it has received 76 - 11 = 65 karma as of now.