| I don't think it's easier to lose points here. Gaining points is easy if your comments are constructive and actionable. Opinions and anything argumentative generally isn't very useful. One thing you can try is looking through your comment history and see which of your comments got the most upvotes. One of my highest upvotes was in a thread about whether software engineers should waste time doing telephone customer support, and I linked to a story of when William from Microsoft took a customer support call: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15813387 Another was a comment about where I got my first customers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14192711 Or linking to a strategy for finding product ideas: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14040708 Checking your most upvoted comments can also be a way to find topics that you should turn into a blog post. If the HN community found it interesting and suddenly gave you 10x the upvotes you usually get, then it's probably also useful to the wider world. When I've been downvoted, it's usually because I've poorly researched something & provided incorrect information. |
I personally think the downvoting feature is fine, just really overused by people with much more karma that it makes the website less enjoyable to visit, especially for new people. And sure, one of the things I love about this site is that there are legitimate gurus on here, but a lot of people take their ability to downvote to classic Dunning Kruger syndrome.
Perhaps a quarter point penalty for downvoting to stop spamming and for people to consider the worthiness of a downvote or ignore. After all, Karma is how you treat others, and constantly negging them with no explanation isn't very kind at all especially for the majority of the people on this site that just want to learn.