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Comment by codeka | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's as bad as that. It's the mean number of friends, not the median.

The example of twitter makes this a bit more clear: your followers have more followers, on average, than you. But that's because you likely follow someone with a million followers. That one person greatly affects the mean follower count.

So if you follow 10 people, one of whom has 1000 followers, and the rest just have one, the paradox still holds.

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This comment seems to have downvotes - why? This made the linked paradox click for me, and seems like a good explanation. Is it incorrect?

and now your comment is in the grey with no explanation. It's absurd how downvote-happy HN's been lately, really kills the conversation...

Off topic: I would be curious to get statistics about the evolution of the ratio of downvotes/upvotes the past few years on HN. I also have the sentiment that HNers have been very "downvote-happy" lately, as you put it. I really think downvotes should be rationed in some way (and not just enabled after some karma threshold is reached).

My new habit: Automatically up-vote every greyed-out comment I encounter. I don't go searching for them, but when I see one, I upvote it without even reading it.

I used to read them carefully first, to decide whether I should up-vote. But from that experience, I've learned I almost always should -- the downvotes were rarely warranted, and almost always lazy and brainless. So I may as well save time and cut to the chase -- just upvote.

(If enough of us do this, maybe we can minimize the problem HN is seemingly unwilling and/or unable to address.)

I've been doing that as well. Sometimes a downvoted comment is truly deserving of its status, but often incorrect statements get downvotes even though they spawn interesting discussions. I try to offset that, because even if they're wrong, they're still an important part of the conversation.

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