[dahart]

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Near the bottom, "Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

My personal voting philosophy matches yours, I tend to take downvotes more seriously, but it is not site policy, and it is acceptable here and lots of people do drive-by downvote, as you put it, for simple disagreement as well as other legitimate reasons. This is a good reason to resist taking downvotes personally, to resist speculating on why they were given, and to resist commenting about them when they happen.

One way to think about voting is symmetry -- maybe it's okay if downvotes are given out as freely as upvotes, and for the exact same reasons. If I upvote something I like without explanation, maybe it should be fine to downvote something I dislike without explanation. In a group heavy on engineers, perhaps this approach has an appealing consistency.

[iak8god]

> Near the bottom, "Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

I have always read that as meaning that a commenter should resist commenting about having one's own comment downvoted. The comment you responded to above was making an interesting point (I thought) about someone else being downvoted, which seemed to me to be more in line with the spirit of the guidelines.

The site's approach of not giving users the power to downvote until they basically prove they're interacting in good faith (by reaching the karma threshold) reinforces the seriousness of downvotes for me. Here I'm much more conservative with them than on reddit, for instance, official reddiquette notwithstanding.

[dahart]

I agree, and I read it the same way, but it is widely interpreted as resist commenting about downvotes at all. Furthermore, it seems to be widely interpreted as a strict rule rather than a suggested guideline.

Since the guideline isn't specific, there's certainly room for varied interpretation. And since many people exercise their downvotes based on their own interpretation, I find I'm happier if I avoid the issue by generally not discussing downvotes unless, like here, people are genuinely curious and I feel like trying to help.

Btw, note I didn't reply directly to the downvote comments, I only jumped in late to reply to your question. My take is @mozumder made a blanket generalization about white engineers that people were reacting to, @Neutralid jumped to conclusions about why the downvotes were occurring and suggested that @mozumder's views were being suppressed ideologically, which isn't the simplest explanation, and @JoeAltmaier demonstrated one of the common interpretations of HN guidelines.

The takeaway from this is that downvotes happen, so don't worry too much, and that there's just a whole lot that can go wrong when communicating, whether it's average people talking politics, or above average engineers on HN, so use a wide berth, give benefit of the doubt, be charitable in your interpretations, and you'll have more fun. :)

[iak8god]

Ah yes, I'd confused you with @JoeAltmaier. Good takeaway :)