[soco]

From what I can tell, the provocative ideas exposed on less than two rows of text are the ones getting downvotes. If I can dissent with a well written text, downvotes come very rarely, if ever. Which tells me dissent is acceptable (here) if it brings a story, proofs, younameit. And dissent for the sake of dissent, less. Which kind of mirrors real life, right?

[revelio]

As someone with sometimes provocative views, providing full citations etc helps but it's easily observed that people who mindlessly promote herd wisdom can simply make comments like "That looks like nonsense" or "That's arguing in bad faith" with nothing else, and yet they don't get voted down.

Unfortunately, votes are meant to be used to judge comment quality but most people use them to try and penalize or reward views they already have regardless of merit. It's easy to get voted up by +100 simply by making snarky low value comments that agree with the current HN vibe, and a long comment with 5 citations will easily sit at 0 or -1 if it's ideologically inconvenient.

[soco]

You said "It's easy to get voted up by +100 simply by making snarky low value comments that agree with the current HN vibe" - are you sure about this, or just imagining it? Because one can only see their own votes and for me I never had this happening.

[revelio]

Yes, absolutely sure. This comment of mine got voted up to 171:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35482810

... and it was just a cheap dunk on Musk. I actually quite like Elon overall, although my shock in that comment is genuine, but since liberals decided he's a traitor to the cause mindless anti-musketry is in vogue.

Normally I post things that go against the zeitgeist, but in that case we happened to align = instant karma.

Whereas, for example, a drastically higher effort comment with five citations showing something unexpected about climatology (e.g. that Arctic sea ice is at the same level right now as it was in 1981) will get +3 at most, possibly -1, quite possibly flagged. Often hard to tell what will happen. I sometimes suspect the absolute number of upvotes is much larger but that they get balanced with a nearly equal number of downvotes.