Does anyone else get confused about why your comments get downvoted? | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else get confused about why your comments get downvoted?

11 pointstomasien9 comments

I can never see a rhyme or reason to why I some of my comments occasionally get flagged and downvoted.

For instance, this comment directed at Sam Altman

"Sam why is your posterous password protected now?"

Just got flagged and a -4. How is that not a legitimate question?

I've certainly had a comment or two that was actually negative that may have deserved the downvotes, but for the life of me I can't figure out most of them.

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Because they don't add any value to the discussion in the downvoters' opinion.

I remember your comment (Y Combinator's First Batch: Where Are They Now? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4341770) and IMO it wasn't really related to the subject discussed.

Are you kidding? I was trying to read Sam's Posterous, which is referenced in the original post! And it was password protected, and he commented in the thread! Jeez, how is that not relevant?

When I've been downvoted, it's usually because the readership misunderstood me. For example, in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3577112, I made a joke about a Github employee's bravado in a thread at 37signals. It was interpreted as my accusing 37signals of ddosing Github even though the Github employee replied and got the joke. Once I edited the post to strongly emphasize I wasn't accusing 37signals of hacking, the downvote trend somewhat reversed itself.

P.S. Those who downvoted my reply to myself were entirely justified. It's never worth it here to poke fun at downvoters in the middle of a thread about a different topic, and it's not a comment that adds to discussion no matter how it is received.

I find the same thing here and on Reddit. Seems like a lot of people just breeze through it and if they don't love it (or find a cat picture /rimshot) they downvote. I would love downvote with options as mratzloff suggests and a little pie chart report as to why.

I do like the idea of choosing a reason from a short list when you hit the down vote button. For that matter, I like the idea of doing that for up votes, too.

Ah, full cycle back to /. :)

Not that that's a bad thing. Its moderation system has always been its strong point.

If you spend your time worrying about downvotes you're going to have a bad time. You've given us no context for the comment you're referencing so we can't really answer your question about that but I can tell you that you will be much happier if you worry less about imaginary internet points and just focus on participating with quality content.

My old account got banned from posting because of 3 straight comments that were downvoted, all of them misunderstood to be negative. So yeah it matters.

It's because downvoters are little, ivisible as*oles :)

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