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Comment by roarcher | Hacker News Reader

A word of unsolicited advice: HNers are a prickly lot and will downvote without explanation because you stepped on some unknowable pet peeve of theirs that probably nobody else in the world shares. This happens all the time but you likely only notice when you happen to get downvoted before any upvotes and end up at 0 or -1. If your comment is reasonable, it will usually come back up.

But complaining about downvotes will certainly earn more of them.

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I always blame it on the HN UI, especially on a touch device. The up/down vote arrow is a pretty small target and once you hit it, the arrows go away with no visual indication of which way you voted.

If you look close there is either a unvote or undown added to the line. However that is easy to miss. I've learned to always check that line on a touch device because there is no way to consistently hit the tiny arrow correctly (at least not for my body)

Don't forget the post score is a balance of up votes and down votes. This mean 2 down votes and 0 up votes registers the same (-1) as 10 down votes and 8 up votes (-1).

So there's no sense treating it like the community has forsaken you.

Thats a good point to highlight.

If the purpose of down votes is to guide discussion away from uninteresting or counterproductive paths, then it also scoops up divisive comments.

I suppose divisive comments are potentially disruptive if they are particularly flamey. But it seems like they deserve to be distinguished from more objectively negative comments. If the raw up/downs were exposed it would be interesting to experiment with this in the front end.

I'm pretty sure that downvotes from some users, perhaps those at a given karma threshold, count twice. I've seen quite a few posts that aren't otherwise attracting a lot of attention go straight from 1 to -1 more-or-less instantly, or from 3 back to 1.

It's also possible that they have experimented with fuzzing votes like Reddit does.

Either way, they don't seem inclined to disclose how it works behind the scenes. The Kremlinology of Hacker News is half the fun.

Indeed, I'm basing my statement on observation, I don't think they've ever disclosed exactly how the math works.

Don’t forget the old “downvote the other comments so mine goes to the top “ trick.

All your best stuff will get downvoted by at least somebody eventually. For some reason, that somebody always gets in early enough that you notice.

I quite often upvote comments I disagree with that have been downvoted for no apparent reason. Sometimes I vouch for flagged comments for the same reason too. That said, the last one I vouched for was flagged again and so were all the commentor's other comments.

I don't think that's certain at all. What affects votes is:

1. Being near the top of the page

2. Having a downvote already

You can curtail the bandwagon effect by complaining.

> You can curtail the bandwagon effect by complaining.

I've observed the opposite--complaints are often more heavily downvoted than the original downvoted comment. The one I originally replied to is an example, at least at the moment.

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