[GuB-42]

One strange thing I noticed on HN is that some of my most upvoted posts are in area outside my field of expertise. I do everything I can to fact check myself, but I'm sure I have been wrong several times and there are people more qualified than me to answer.

And some of my posts that are well within my field of expertise stay at zero.

When I get downvoted it is usually when I post an unpopular opinion, but rarely as a result of being wrong.

All this to say that while HN is, I think, one of the best communities, it doesn't mean you should leave your guard down. I'd say it is even more insidious here because you won't find easily debunked bullshit, no flat earthers here. Falsehoods here are to be subtle enough to go unnoticed by an educated mind, and you are not guaranteed to be corrected by a real expert.

[ehnto]

My least popular comments are also comments I have made with hard won experience in my field.

My not-very-humble guess is that it is two fold: One, if you only have a shallow understanding of something, it is easy to dismiss things as wrong if they don't align with your understanding so far. Two, if you do have a deep understanding of a topic but different experiences in the field, you may have really strong opinions in a different direction.

Disappointingly they are also usually the least discussed comments of mine and I rarely figure out why they were downvoted.

[croissants]

Can you link to some of your "hard won experience" comments? Now I'm curious about them.

[randcraw]

In my case, I work for a large pharmaceutical. Many of the driving forces behind drug development or healthcare decisions arise in business priorities, practices, and regulations that are complex and unintuitive to outsiders. Unless I reinforce my POV with explanation of why and how these subterranean forces drive outcomes, I'm likely to find myself downvoted — presumably because readers discount my perspective as insufficiently plausible or wrong outright, perhaps because I haven't offered enough explanation. But since longwinded explication of arcane background minutiae is tiresome to write and for others to read, so I often demur to the detriment of my score.