I remember when they were on the agenda path to eliminate gifs. You'd see posts on hacker news written by Giffy, a company seeking to make its existence justified by getting rid of gifs, all over hacker news.

When I would say: This is a terrible idea, they just want to control and own the content. a gif you own, a gif you can download and so what ever you wanted, etc. boy was I down voted into oblivion.

One of the reasons for this is many posts aren't on hacker news by accident, they are hidden advertisements. Chances are, you got the karma to downvote people. Just starting off at -1 is a disadvantage.

You can try it too: just disagree with what an article says in the comments, 99% of the time you will be downvoted. Agree and you get free karma. This is not always the case, but generally is.