[freehunter]

Good god this is so false. I cannot even begin to comprehend that someone would make the statement that anyone supporting women's rights will be automatically downvoted on Hacker News. You can't imagine any other reason the post would be downvoted? How about the statement that you shouldn't say anything you wouldn't want tweeted out of context? How about calling Twitter "tweeter"? Or the implication that this guy had it coming because he should have known better than to try to have a private conversation without it being plastered on the Internet?

There are a number of reasons someone could have downvoted this post, and the first one that jumps to your mind is that a great number of people on HN inherently hate women and don't believe in equal rights. Seriously, I can't even fathom...

[mtrimpe]

If you take a look at my comment history you'll see that I tend to comment on womens rights issues quite frequently, since I'm LGBT myself so their cause is quite close to my heart.

I can tell you from experience that I've seen my votes go up and down 5 or 10 points easily when I comment on topics like these. I've never noticed that for any other comments I make.

[eropple]

I post not infrequently on these issues (this is an aversion for me as this is a case where the female party is unambiguously wrong and behaved in a manner no better and arguably worse than the two guys) and I never see what you claim. So I'm not saying you're wrong, but I am skeptical of it being endemic to the topic.

The post whose downvotes you are ascribing to misogyny can also just be called a poor post. Which, FWIW, I do.

[freehunter]

I could understand your statement if the post in question was a worthwhile contribution to a discussion, was well formatted, and had a reasonable writing style (grammar and spelling). But with as many flaws as the post had, attributing the downvotes purely to an apparently large population of misogynists on HN seems to be a strawman designed to further the already controversial discussion at hand.

[mtrimpe]

He seemed genuinely confused as to why he received these downvotes and I just tried to inform him that, apart from his comment not being particularly good, he was probably also the victim of excessive downvoting due to the polarizing nature of the topic.