That question doesn't get asked enough. I'm tired of getting downvoted with no comments. I'm tired of people not understanding the subtleties of my positions and arguing against me just based on a communication issue.
It's not that frequent. It seems it's just a subset if the readers who misapply what I say. If it were a large part of the group, then I would be looking at myself more closely. I would guess that everyone has been misunderstood at some point on here.
Just yesterday I was about to downvote somebody for what I thought was a ludicrous suggestion. But when I started writing a reply, I realized that a), he may actually have had a point, and b), though I was still sceptical, I didn‘t actually understand the issue well enough to refute him.
I would even say that if you're not frequently getting downvoted with no comments, then your comments are harmfully not enough contrarian.
If only there could be a webextension that would act as a meta recommender-system for HN comments that would highlight such sufficiently contrarian authors then I could quickly, heuristically read those more than average, valuable comments.
Being on the bottom is an aggregate that factor in the recency of the comment, isn't it? Moreover ideally only a subset of comments would be highlighted (e.g not the ones downvoted too much) and would benefit from making stats from the user comments history in order to increase the signal to noise ratio
If people frequently misinterpret you, it's logically sound to look at the common denominator