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Comment by 5hoom | Hacker News Reader

I hear you, felt a bit dirty myself on HN for the first time today.

Earlier today I posted what was obviously a controversial comment on a previous story, got lots of down-votes, fine.

The bit I find strange is that other comments on unrelated stories got down-voted near simultaneously. My other posts weren't that great or anything, but I've posted stuff of about the same quality before & generally been up-voted (or ignored).

My little anecdote could well be coincidence (& probably is) but my point is that in any community there are those who like to engage in petty vendettas, and there are some who are just jerks.

Keep the faith good sir. You obviously _are_ a 'real nerd' (judging from your blog posts), and looks like you're doing just fine with that :)

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I too have seen this pattern of downvoting comments by the same author (i.e. me). It seems that some people here are disagreeing with a comment and then punishing the author my downvoting other comments by the same author.

This happens to me too. Usually when I am posting something in a political thread.

Likewise. It's been going on for a while. When it first started I was wondering if it would pass or if this is a strange attractor of these types of sites or what-have-you. Now, I am disappointed. Every now and again it appears like someone will downvote a lot of my comments without comment.

It's the "without comment" that is the poison here, IMHO.

It's not necessarily malicious. It could be someone checking out your other posts to see where you're coming from, and then finding out that in turns out they disagree with all of your recent comments.

I agree, but that would probably be rare, especially across threads. The culture here for a while (HN in its "prime") was that if something merited a downvote, then it merited a comment articulating the dissent. We didn't have too many trolls (a few, but not many), so most of the time it was better to stimulate the discussion by posting your explicit disagreements.

In fact, it was common to upvote people who presented an interesting opinion even if you disagreed with it.

Now it's common to see someone downvoted into the gray without a single response. In short, if somebody has to ask "why the downvotes?" we're doing it wrong. (Presumably trolls know why they are getting downvoted.)

While that's true, it does seem like a pattern. I've been downvoted in recent days for offering someone praise for a sharing something useful. I can't help but shake my head as I know it's someone who doesn't like something I said on another post and is following me around.

It's the "without comment" that is the poison here, IMHO.

The dilemma here is that most people don't want to read petty squabbles. So if a poster says something you think is really stupid and offensive, commenting is likely to devolve into a back-and-forth that earns a pile of downvotes from everyone else.

I realize there's a difference between a single downvote for a post and a series of "punishment" downvotes, but the same idea applies.

It occurs to me that a nice feature for hacker news would be to have a comment box on the user profile page which would allow the equivalent of private messages. That way instead of the alternatives being (a) downvote, (b) public response and sometimes (c) email; you could resolve the conflict with the person via private messages.

So if a poster says something you think is really stupid and offensive

If I think a poster is trolling, I'll ignore him/her. I encourage others to do the same. Trolling is no fun if somebody doesn't take the bait.

If the person doesn't seem to be trolling but is just posting something "stupid and offensive," call him/her out on it and say why. The poster may not realize how "stupid/offensive" the post is. That's the value of this community. You can learn here.

call him/her out on it and say why.

Often, it's really hard to do this without starting a petty meta-argument. It can be hard to call someone out and maintain focus on the topics people actually want to read about.

For example, I have downvoted people for complaining about getting downvotes. Sometimes I explain, if I can do it in a way that I think adds real value to the discussion, but really: it's in the guidelines. Nobody wants to see someone complain about downvotes and then see me complain about the complaining, which can easily start a flamewar. So I downvote and move on.

Another example is prefacing a sentence with "look,". This is almost always condescending and unnecessary in written communication. If I really think people would appreciate an explanation of why this is condescending I will explain, but usually doing that will distract from the real discussion.

Sometimes really lazy posts with blatant logical fallacies and lack of substance get a downvote without a comment. Because really, if there's no substance then what is there to comment about?

> It's the "without comment" that is the poison here, IMHO.

No, it isn't.

Stop worrying about votes and karma. And if you can't stop worrying about it, at least stop posting about it.

There's always someone who doesn't like you or something that you wrote. (Yes even special snowflakes like you.)Votes merely expose that.

Stop worrying about votes and karma. And if you can't stop worrying about it, at least stop posting about it.

Sorry. If you think that's what's going on then you've completely missed my point.

On the other hand, there are people doing what I do - sometimes I will disagree with the point that a person makes in a thread, and I downvote them, but as I found their point well-argued, though ultimately wrong, I will then search their history to find a post that I can upvote to balance out the karma...

The problem with down-voting over disagreements is that the person who made the post now knows that someone disagrees, but has absolutely no idea why.

I participate in discussions because it is a great opportunity to learn. If I have said something that is wrong, I would really like to know why. I might even agree with you. Karma serves absolutely no purpose. The loss of a point means nothing. Insightful discussions, on the other hand, hold a lot of meaning and value.

If you disagree, formulate a thoughtful reply. Save your down votes for the obvious spam.

That's one reason there's a limited window for downvoting posts. I think it's about 24 hours and the downvote arrow goes away.

I recall reading that HN's karma algorithm dampens the effect of rapid downvoting somehow, precisely to mitigate this sort of karma vendetta. Anyone know for sure?

It's hard to tell now that karma listings are hidden, but in the past this was definitely true.

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