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There's probably an element of truth to that, but it's also a large forum that gets about 5 million unique visitors per month and I'm a demographic outlier on multiple axes, so I simply express myself differently from the way most people here do. (I also focus on things that would never occur to most people here, which can easily be perceived as irrelevant.) I suspect a high percentage of the downvotes I get -- and I do get quite a lot of them, but I have no data on what's "normal" -- are simply people who have no idea I'm a woman, don't think the way I do, don't have the background knowledge I have, can't see how it's pertinent and are unaware of me being someone with any particular expertise that anyone "should" respect or be interested in. (Edit: In fact, I fairly often get feedback that the person I'm arguing with assumed I was male simply because it is HN and HN is overwhelmingly male, which lefthandedly implies "Doreen blends and does not read as girly.") In this case, the downvotes occurred after I added the qualifier that I don't have startup experience, so a very good guess is that it was downvoted by someone who thinks my knowledge of how people work doesn't apply and I'm just some blowhard and armchair politician who shouldn't have added "low value content" to HN. The degree to which I have formally studied people topics (negotiation, social psychology, etc) is something alien to a lot of STEM folks who see that as a soft science and not something you can really understand with any confidence. There is a lot of hand-wavy BS in areas like psychology. I'm quite critical of such things myself, though it often doesn't go over well for me to do that either because the degree to which I think I understand a more bright line standard for how to study social phenomenon is also not seen by most people as anything believable. On the upside, my latest parenting blog is something some people have expressed real interest in. That's an area of social expertise and it might eventually get real traction, unlike so many of my projects. (Hopefully, the mods will come along and hide this entire discussion of why my comment was temporarily greyed out before being upvoted. Discussion of downvotes is something the guidelines ask people to not engage in. I'm not redacting this comment cuz reasons. But this is all off topic.) |
I have to say, I don't have an issue with downvote discussions when they are initiated by someone other than the original poster. Such conversations frequently lead somewhere interesting, as this one did, whereas the opposite type (in which the original poster complains) never does.
I sometimes come across fully grayed out comments that I simply cannot imagine why anyone would ever downvote. I upvote these, but I'd very much like to know why they were downvoted in the first place. Did the author get their facts wrong? Is there an angle I'm missing? Could the comment be construed as offensive?
I've heard it suggested that no one should downvote comments without leaving a reply on why they downvoted. This strikes me as completely unreasonable, but allowing users (who aren't the OP) to ask "hey, why was this downvoted" in cases where they're legitimately confused seems like a good compromise.
I do also see how this might get out of hand if it was officially allowed... but maybe worth a try?