| You might be right. Even when in many cases you can immediately tell downvotes were necessary, deserved and the commenter should've seen it coming. I've also encountered many cases that confused me a bit and at the time didn't quite understand why those people/commenters were being downvoted. So I've spent a long time just reading HN without commenting, trying to first understand the culture, the news are just as important as the people curating them IMHO.
After sometime I've begun to understand the different mindsets and dynamics; there are many discernible reasons to be downvoted by the community, there's for example, being perceived as a shill or a strawman, and etc. And correct me if I'm wrong but there's also the secret/magic algorithms making the mod's jobs easier, I don't think those algorithms are perfect and may make mistakes sometimes, that's understandable. But there are still enough cases that I suspect ended up being downvoted just because disagreement motive or maybe even for irrational emotion (very rarely do strong emotions come with reason) motive. And there's also the case of Trigger-happy-downvoting individuals, all these latter cases generate such damage that I have * sometimes * even found myself a bit suspicious of the worth of the HN community as a whole. But I stressed "sometimes" for a reason... ...One has to understand that communities change, that's a fact, and as YC has had success and obtained more and more media attention (and therefore HN as well), different kind of audiences have joined the flock (me included, since a few years ago). My guess is that HN's community is still adapting to the new audience, must be tough since there must be thousands of real people along with hundreds of fake accounts (some with nefarious purposes) and bots. In the end, you'll find it more useful to acquire a thick skin and a "deal with it" attitude towards gratuitous negativity (down-voters included), but not an impermeable shell because sometimes there's some useful criticism behind rude negativity, just don't take it personal and master the art of spinning the conversation towards a constructive direction. Side note:
>> anonymously down-voting / reporting someone's opinion just because it's not yours is just as mean-spirited as calling someone names. Amazingly well phrased, I had to point that one out :) |
This is the most important lesson I was never formally taught about discourse. If you can mange to be Kind & Thick-skinned you will be capable of communicating with a far wider group of people than those who are missing one component of that pair.