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Comment by OrvalWintermute | Hacker News Reader

I think the downvote brigading is getting more frequent.

Just look at the recent threads where a submission was flagged and you will see a ton of them.

Unfortunately, HN isn't showing the data behind quantities but due to the oscillations we see, there are definitely significant amounts of downvoting occuring.

View on HN

Submission flagging is the main place it happens and I personally wish HN will not treat flagging as downvotes, or would just call it downvotes, or would have some sort of penalty for obvious cases of mis-flagging.

FWIW every time I have ever flagged something on HN it’s been a fat finger mistake on mobile. Probably a drop in the bucket but worth considering that the signal is still polluted even with perfectly good faith user behavior.

I’m entering grey beard territory, been on HN for years, and I still don’t know what the [-] button does. Is it a downvote? Or does it just collapse the parent so I can read more without clutter? You’d hope downvote UI would be more explicit.

[–] collapses the comment and all children.

When logged in, I have upvote buttons on all comments, and I believe downvote buttons are enabled at over a certain amount of karma.

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/m... 501 apparently

You don't have the ability to downvote. It's a down arrow right below the upvote (up arrow).

[-] collapses the parent, you're correct. You can also unvote if you change your mind on your vote.

It happens to me whenever I say something critical of any given specific country. USA, China, Russia, I get hammered with downvotes and flags. Make a positive comment, hammered with upvotes. It's frustrating.

If you say anything positive or negative about something people hold as part of their identity you're going to get a response. I think it's better that you get votes, instead of a bunch of emotional comments.

No, it is better to get comments, even emotional and not well written. Because with comments I might understand where I was wrong, or at least know where exactly my opponent disagrees with me, because it I could have written a wall of text, not every sentence of it is wrong.

Even a comment like "fuck you you are dumb bastard hateful shit" tells me much more than a downvote. With comment like that I know that the opponent is not interested in productive conversation, so I move on.

And if people downvotes because they are emotional, this is not the place where I'd like to participate in discussions. I'm interested in the grown up respectful dispute and the extending each other world view.

A place where everyone agrees with each other is boring and a waste of time.

A place where everyone agrees with each other is boring and a waste of time.

If everyone agreed there would be no need for voting, or even for comments. Very rarely do people gang up and down vote someone to oblivion, usually controversial opinions are up and down throughout the day. Plus there is a max amount of karma you can lose from down voting anyway, I think it's 5. It basically only affects new users who are out of line, or are trying to be provocative. I think it's the main thing that keeps HN the best forum on the internet. Well, third best thing behind dang, and sctb.

edit: also, HN is generally geared towards less comments of a higher quality. The biggest example is that if comments exceed votes by a certain amount, the story is automatically dropped from the front page.

> Because with comments I might understand where I was wrong

Someone can disagree with you without you being wrong. If you think they are wrong in their response...what good is being done? If you both have intractable positions then more discussion on the topic is just lengthening scroll bars.

Additionally if I disagree with you or just think you're wrong I don't owe you any explanation of that. You don't have a right to my time because we disagree. It's not my job to convince you. I may choose to reply to you (as I obviously just have) but it's my choice entirely. You may reply back to me and I may never ever read it, I don't have any requirement to do so.

Curiously, just mentioning the existence of Windows LTSC / Windows LTSB used to get me four to five downvotes as an expected behavior, despite it being relevant to many "I thought Enterprise had more control than thins!" conversations.

>Curiously, just mentioning the existence of Windows LTSC / Windows LTSB used to get me four to five downvotes as an expected behavior

Just to be clear, you expect to get downvotes when mentioning LTSB? This does not match my experience, and I also made several LTSB mentions.

Well, my comment is already at -1, so yes.

I could see that happening if you are presenting it as a solution to some problem and the downvoters perceive it as an unrealistic alternative. As far as I’m aware it isn’t that easy to obtain.

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