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by prettymuchthis 4179 days ago
Exactly. I spent a couple weeks building up my little HN points once. Then I made a comment like "That was a very interesting article!" and was downvoted to hell. I asked why, and that was downvoted to hell. Negative karma after working on positive for two weeks.

So fsck you very much you guys. Every last one of you with your little down vote button. Now when I feel the urge to post here, I create a single use throwaway account, say whatever I feel like, and then log out.

HN is very much a hivemind. It's easy to see when you're not worried about your negative internet points.

2 comments

I'm sorry you were downvoted with no explanation, I'm sure that sucked after gaining positive karma.

As you may know, what you ran into there were two foundational ideas in HN culture, which are:

1. Don't post "trivial" comments that are common on Reddit, like "+1", "thanks for that!", "interesting article!". HN tries to maintain a very high signal to "noise" ratio by discouraging these kinds of comments, and I actually appreciate it, since reading through lots of those types of comments makes it difficult to focus on comments meant to foster further discussion, or to inform.

2. It's an official guideline not to complain about being downvoted. Your comment asking why you were downvoted may have been interpreted as complaining about being downvoted. If you were just asking why, I'm sorry you were downvoted and that no one bothered to explain.

Every online community has its quirks, and you just happened to run into two of them with your comments in that post. Personally, I've never worried too much about accumulating points on HN. I just try to post informative comments, or comments meant to provoke discussion, and things have gone well.

Again, sorry you were downvoted for asking a simple question. I'd not do that.

> Negative karma after working on positive for two weeks...I create a single use throwaway account, say whatever I feel like, and then log out.

> HN is very much a hivemind. It's easy to see when you're not worried about your negative internet points.

The problem isn't HN and the hivemind. The problem here is you. You still care about the points (or rather the consequences of them) because you take the trouble to create a throwaway account, so that when your post is upvoted, or downvoted, you don't feel tied to it.

If you truly didn't care you would either:

1) stop posting on here altogether 2) not care about what others thought of your comments, and stop using throwaway accounts.