Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jnbiche 4178 days ago
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.