Ask HN: Is someone down-voting all my comments because they don't like me?

Why do you care at all? Seneca said that if you publish something you have to bear the critics.

Sounds as if you have alternative motives to know who down-votes you.

Suggestion: create a new profile and test if downvoting happens due to you or the article you post?

I was under the impression that voting rings and whatnot are already something that dang and the other mods watch out for; we as users don't need to see who downvotes us. If we could see identifiable information about downvotes, it would be too tempting to downvote THEM out of revenge.

I don't think I would do such a thing, but I don't even want to have such knowledge color my reading of future comments. Part of the intention of HN is that we read and vote on comments for their merits and contribution to a discussion -- even if we don't always agree with the author -- and I would not want to discount someone's writing just because they downvoted something I wrote.

Maybe if there were a one-way hash of usernames we could see for who downvotes, we could have public insight into the insight of voter rings ("____ has downvoted my comments 3000% more than anyone else ...") without the chance of contaminating our perception of others' discourse, but I doubt that we have better info than the mods already have about posters.

This seems to be an issue with any type of site. I had a similar problem with Reddit. I found that eventually people lose interest. At the end of the day losing internet points isnt the end of the world.

>. when a single person down-votes another persons comments in mass in a short period of time, or on a sustained basis. Revenge down-voting, that is.

You are assuming a person's motives based only on behavior.

In a very rare exception to Betteridge's Law, I'd say the answer to your question is probably yes. The more interesting question is how long they'll be able to get away with it. As others point out, the mods already try to detect and prevent abuse of the upvote/downvote mechanisms. OTOH it's not clear how well automated that process is, or how effective their efforts are. It certainly seems to me that coordinated upvoting and downvoting are still pretty much par for the course on this and any other similar site.

Don't have proof but I believe there is a limit to how many times you can up/downvote each account.

… would the overall "economics" of HN make sense if a down-vote cost 1 point of reputation, or some fraction thereof?

I had an opposite problem once, somebody was blindly upvoting my silly comments. Luckily, it didn't last long so I didn't have to post an Ask HN

What if all of your comments are terrible? I mean I'm not saying they are, but if your comments are regularly not very productive you'll see down voting but there's no individual actor doing it.

I wonder if it's because of your username?