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Comment by hilbert42 | Hacker News Reader

"Don't know why you're getting downvoted..."

Ha, some of my most thoughtful and most balanced posts where I've put both sides of an argument have been downvoted the most.

Sometimes—usually with controversial topics—I've sat on my post and watched the votes oscillating up and down so in the end I've ended up with none or near zero.

From my experience, almost inevitably, downvoters don't offer a counter viewpoint or argument. Whilst irrelevant when it comes to my posts, it is important when scaled up to real politics. Voting out of gut reaction isn't helpful.

It seems to me that as gut reaction can now be manipulated so easily in today's world that it's a substantial reason why democracies and the democratic process are in such a mess.

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> Sometimes—usually with controversial topics—I've sat on my post and watched the votes oscillating up and down so in the end I've ended up with none or near zero.

Probably a form of upvoting that represents "I don't really agree with you, but I don't agree with the downvotes either". That means many comments will start attracting upvotes only when they are greyed out. It isn't so rare for reasonable but downvoted comments to bubble back up to exactly +1.

> From my experience, almost inevitably, downvoters don't offer a counter viewpoint or argument.

It'd be interesting to know how many people just don't use downvotes as a matter of course. The signal they send is wildly ambiguous. Although in this case I'd guess it was the ranty tone of the comment and the lack of charity, evidence or argument beyond assertions were the major factors.

"It'd be interesting to know how many people just don't use downvotes as a matter of course. The signal they send is wildly ambiguous."

Right. That's why I reckon HN should give the poster (and only the poster) the stats for both up and downvotes. As often, I'll not watch the voting but only get to see the final tally many days later and to find it sitting on zero or minus one. One's left not knowing whether one's view was middle-of-the-road and received lots of votes either way or if it was just one downvoter.

Also, I'd like to see HN publish anonymized stats on how people vote, it would be interesting to know how many downvoters subsequently comment or fail to do so. Same with upvoters but I'd reckon downvoter stats would be more informative.

BTW, see my reply to throwaway7ahgb, I posted it before reading your comment.

Edit: in the time I've taken to write this reply my post to which you replied has been downvoted from two votes to one. There's been no subsequent negative comment in the interim. Point proved perhaps? ;-)

IMHO you should be downvoted for comments such as "It's not because anyone in the Republican party actually cares about any of this". This dismisses 100M+ people and their beliefs.

Right, I was making a general point, sometimes it's difficult to summarize succinctly in a few words.

It's why I rarely downvote a comment despite errors or political views (from my stance I much prefer to argue the point giving my reasons). That said, some comments are just so wrong and or egregious that it's obvious additional comments won't help and if posted they'd only inflame things further.

I've learned this from experience, on more than one occasion I've seen HN delete a complete thread (full length of the chain to the top) after I made a very reasonable reply to a very egregious comment posted somewhere near its bottom. The poster then took ofence and still others came to my defense and matters cascaded to the point where it was deleted. If I'd ignored the comment or just downvoted it then it's likely the thread would have remained intact. Trouble was many other intelligent comments were deleted in the process.

It's almost impossible to make generalizations on HN. You'll say "X is typically Y" and someone will always come out of the woodwork to reply "Well here is a case where X is not Y. Your entire point is invalid. Gotcha!"

Yeah, right. I will make one generalization though. I've rarely ever had a problem on purely technical points, either I acknowledge I'm wrong or we agree we've been arguing at cross purposes and it's resolved. Even one 'sticky' discussion that involved the controversial sugar substitute aspartame and the correctness of the Wiki entry was largely resolved when we agreed we were arguing at cross purposes. (As you likely know discussions about aspartame can get very heated).

From my experience, the point you're making almost always arises from controversial topics or ones that are or can be construed as political. For example, I remember when HN deleted a thread on veganism. Discussion started out civilized but eventually went ary after an extremist made statements that no reasonable person would have considered correct. Backlash followed from multiple posters and HN ended what was no longer a discussion but a heated argument.

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