[rcarr]

How is it unhinged to post something on an active discussion site and then to refresh the page a minute or two later to see if anyone has replied? That's called having a conversation, there's nothing unhinged about it. There are no notifications on this site, if you want to have a conversation with someone you either refresh the page or you subscribe to the RSS feed of your comments.

All you're doing is trying to deflect away from my arguments and hoping you can frame me as being insane to try and position yourself as right by default. Because how could anything I say have any merit if I'm as "unhinged" as you have declared me to be, for commiting the cardinal sin of checking my messages? That is some dark, manipulative and abusive shit right there.

[fishyjoe]

I'm not hoping to frame you as anything. You posted the multi-paragraph comment calling people who like animals "fucking militants" all on your own before I showed up. Getting that upset/irrationally mad at a group over some downvotes is what I find concerning.

But yeah, apologies about the dig at you refreshing the page frequently. I'm having to do the same to check these messages.

[rcarr]

> Getting that upset/irrationally mad at a group over some downvotes is what I find concerning.

Ok that I can understand. For context, a while back I shared my experience going vegan for an entire year here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33364191

I then got attacked for it and dragged into arguments I didn't really want to have by other vegans. And this similar behaviour has happened repeatedly on other threads to do with veganism, animals, the environment and other culture war topics. It is always particularly bad on anything that could be related to veganism.

I've seen this downvoting pattern happen so frequently now on both mine and other people's comments that it is becoming difficult not to see this as people with a targeted agenda, downvoting things they like with the hope of it getting flagged early and taken out of the conversation all together. Like if you look at the post history of one of the people I ended up in an argument with on on the link above, their entire history is solely dedicated to environmental activism and picking fights with people on these topics to the point that Dang ended up banning him:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=myshpa

It seems unlikely to me that, within a minute, five unrelated people out there all simultaneously read my comment, which in the grand scheme of things was pretty benign, and then decided to downvote it. And I keep seeing this stuff happening on threads that are related to culture war topics over and over again.

Here was another one of my comments on a culture war topic that suffered the same downvoting treatment that eventually had it's flagged status overturned by one of the moderators:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37577525

All I want to do is come online and share my experiences and stories with other people like I'm in a bar just chatting to people. I can and have told these exact same anecdotes in real life without getting attacked for them. It's one thing having a debate with someone on here about some tech topic but it really feels like a punch in the teeth when you share a deeply personal story, purely with the intention of hoping it helps enrich someones day, just to then get turn round and attacked for it. We don't do this to each other in real life, I don't get why people insist on making it different online.