[lifeisstillgood]

As I understand it, -4 is the lowest you can get (basically everyone hates your point of view), so you may have found a bug but more likely found 5 or so people who don’t like you quicker than expected!

I have seen (my) posts bounce up and down so there I suspect there is a lot of Voting going on compare to actual movement. But in the end HN is biased for positivity (as you cannot go lower than -4)

But someone with sight of codebase might have more useful comments

[nickpsecurity]

They come in mobs or waves, too. Historically, they show up first while the reasonable people show up later, sometimes reversing those votes. Others here have noted that phenomenon.

[john_strinlai]

the interesting part here is that it is a submission with negative karma, not a comment.

there is no downvote button on submissions, so it doesnt make sense for it to get negative karma.

[jermaustin1]

I always assumed there WAS downvoting for a submission once you hit a certain threshold of user karma. Like flagging and other community moderating functions.

[mplanchard]

I have not hit it yet, if there is one. Only options are upvoting, flagging, etc.

[MBCook]

Same. Maybe flags count as -1 after enough?

[registeredcorn]

(Open question to anyone reading this)

I've been meaning to ask for quite a while now: What exactly is "flag" supposed to indicate?

I assume it's something more specific than "dislike". I take it to mean something along the lines of, "I think this is (sneaky) spam", or "This does not fit on a technology news site, even tangentially.". Or, perhaps something broader like, "I can't describe what the problem is, but this submission/comment should be reviewed by a moderator."

It's just never been particularly clear what the intention of it is.

[benoau]

> The purpose of flagging is to indicate that a story does not belong on HN. Frivolous flagging—e.g. flagging a story that's clearly on-topic by the site guidelines just because one personally dislikes it—eventually gets an account's flagging privileges taken away. But there's a new 'hide' link for people to click if they'd just like not to see a story.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12173809

[registeredcorn]

Ah, interesting. Thanks!

[tstrimple]

Regardless of the intended purpose. The most common use case is super dislike.

[nostrademons]

83,000 karma and no downvote button on submissions for me.

I think that a submission might get negative votes for being flagged, though, so if 11 people hit the "flag" button that might take it to -10.

[Imustaskforhelp]

A bit offtopic but seeing your karma, I remembered that sometime ago I had made a website which finds how many words a person has written on hackernews and leaderboard stats around it.

I got curious so I checked it with your account and you are globally #23 in that you have written most words and you have written 1,822,427 words which is like 6+ games of thrones (if one GOT has around 300k words)

I also just saw that you have been on hackernews since feb 2007

Your hackernews account is older than me as I was born in 2008 ;)

I am curious how did you find hackernews and what you made stick to the platform for so long and are you perhaps some user number x of hackernews itself like say user number 230 of hackernews, I would be curious to find this data if you might know.

I do wonder if there are any tips in general life that you have for a person like me and I would love to hear your answers!

Thanks for reading and have a nice day :-D

https://serjaimelannister.github.io/hn-words/

[ColinWright]

FWIW: I have over 135K karma and I can't downvote submissions.

[fortran77]

Yes there is.

[genxy]

> But in the end HN is biased for positivity

Ha ha ha.