Losing karma, no. It's more that comments get basically invisible after just a few downvotes. So posting anything unpopular just feels like a waste of time.
That's the point of voting systems. They create or fake the appearance of community homogeneity of opinion by making well articulated wrong-think that might challenge the status quo not worth the effort.
As someone that rarely shies away from speaking my mind, even if it's unpopular - I would say just wait it out...
There's an extremely vocal and downvote happy minority of users on HN that try to force everyone into agreement or cowardice. They will change language definitions and weaponize them against you, or try to turn you into some sort of monster for having differing opinions. Basically anything to silence opposing opinions.
There is also an extremely quiet majority of users on HN that do not wade into those conversations out of what I presume is fear of the brigade or just being exhausted from it all... but they will support your arguments via voting (the only tool at their disposal).
So... just wait out the extremists and allow the normal users to judge the quality of your arguments for what they are. Over a several hour or day long period, you will have a more accurate representation of what HN actually thinks about your arguments. It will be a roller-coaster of ups and downs along the way - that's normal.
Stop caring about the points and start caring about the quality of your arguments or unique perspectives you can communicate. Stop downvoting simply because you disagree, and start downvoting for poorly crafted, provably incorrect and/or poorly communicated arguments.
Speak your mind, no matter what it says. HN should be a place for open discussion from people of all walks of life unified by a loose commonality of a love for technology. It should not be a cesspool of unidirectional thoughts - and those who remain quiet contribute to that just as much as the brigade.
IME anything that's not Reddit-esque banter, trolling, etc. is never really 'unpopular' so much as it is controversial - comments that I notice get downvoted usually go back up too; then down again; where it ends up is perhaps more a function of where it happens to be when interest in the thread waned.
I don't 'care about' it as a score, but I do pay attention to it as an indicator that maybe there's some reply/discussion going on and I should check /threads. It's also a slightly scary proxy for time sunk into HN, I suppose!
Absolutely not. In many contexts of discussion, I view loss of fake internet points as a good thing. For example, hop in a time machine and go back to HN circa 2016 and start blathering about how SQLite is the ultimate, final database solution for 95% of technology products. Seeing that point total go backwards was very empowering to me at the time. Today, this is a textbook karma farming crop.
I also make a point to thoroughly review any comments that are dead/flagged/nearly-invisible for any controversy that is otherwise in the spirit of this community. I'll happily vouch for every one of those, even if there is some consequence to my account standing.
Downvoted. Just kidding, I can't downvote. I do care about karma, but only to reach the level at which you can downvote, only to subsequently prove the promise I made to myself to never downvote anyone on HN.
Not particularly. The closest thing to a benefit for gaining karma is the ability to downvote others at 500, and even then that's not very useful unless others join in.
Personally, I wish that downvoting wasn't an option at all, since its only purpose is to potentially hide opinions you disagree with. Sure, the purpose is SUPPOSED to be about keeping discussions relevant, but we all know that's not what people use it for.
"People can certainly use it that way, but I think it's useful for de-emphasizing irrelevant or inflammatory comments as well."
This is my problem with it, that is mainly used to hide other opinions. Even flagging gets abused for that.
I want to read other opinions, but what I don't want to read are lowe effort crap comments. They can and should be downvoted into nothingness, but downvoting well written out opinions is something I strongly disagree with.
yeah but that's an extra click and a page load to get into the comment to flag it, so unless it's particularly egregious I'll usually just downvote and move on with my life. Which I think is the right design.
I browse with showdead on permanantly, and I normally find that things that have been downvoted to oblivion were truely for spam or inflammatory/bad faith. That's not always the case, but it is definitly the majority I see. Unpopular opinions I normally find stay near 0.
It's not perfect, but I do think HN tends to actually behave decently with respect to downvotes (and I think needing 500 karma to do so is a big part of it - you have to spend the time and get familiar with the culture first)
I'll volunteer myself as an exception to "we all know". I've never thought that downvoting was meant to be used to express disagreement, and I rarely see it being used this way. But I do sometimes see a chain of comments where at least one commenter is clearly misreading / misunderstanding their conversation partner, and getting downvoted for this might feel like getting downvoted for disagreement.
i am sometimes interested when what i consider to be technically correct comment gets downvoted, because it may mean that i have misunderstood something. otherwise, i don't care.
I like it as I have the ability to do a few things after certain Karma but I don't think about it when engaging on HN because I want to be authentic and myself. I do refrain from certain things that are more reddit-isque like sarcasm, jokes, low value comment etc and try to keep it focussed on the topic at hand.
Great way of stating my opinion on it as well. I will also say that out of any site that I post on, I take the most care here. I try to always ask myself if I am adding something worthwhile to the conversation and more importantly, do I have enough background to speak to this topic. I might not always hit that mark, but I would bet that 1 out of 10 times I go to post, I re-read what I wrote and realize it hasn't hit those marks and either don't post or delete immediately. I value my time and I don't want to waste the time of others.
But even if I'm going to say something that few agree with, there are ways and ways of saying it. I'd rather choose the one that doesn't atract downvotes. Not because of karma, but because it's the right thing to do, both online and elsewhere.
I think people should care about it a little: if your posts are generally negative karma there's a good chance you're confused about what we're doing here. But it's fine if it goes down sometimes, especially if people are downvoting you for controversial opinions.
Personally, it hasn't stopped me from expressing myself, no.
I do actually care about my karma, I'm fine with taking downvotes for my opinions that might go against the grain, so long as the downvoter follows it up with their reasons and an actual discussion can take place.
I know myself though I have been guilty of reacting poorly to a mass downvote spam so as much as I hate to admit it, I do care about the karma.
No. Maybe if the karma was viewable while browsing a thread I would care. But since it's only viewable by going to my profile, most people aren't even going to know if my karma is high or low.
no, i hide the karma count with ublock and will discard the account if it unlocks the special reward threshold, 200 i think it is here.
in pirate times the fun of making someone walk the plank was to convince the victim to jump off himself with a little sword prodding as a disincentive to getting back on deck. I intent to just get a new plank each time instead of jumping into a watery grave "by choice".
Nope. But from experience, I do know that any kind of user-moderated sites or sites that use such karma systems, eventually enforce groupthink of the dominant group through those systems. Even if they dont want to do that.
It’s a nice feedback check. I don’t post that often so I usually see how the last post performed when I log in the next day. Usually my posts are met with indifference. But it’s interesting to see the posts that perform highly negative or highly positive.
Except it's not very deep. Did I get downvoted for being too inflammatory, or of being rude, or for making my point poorly, or because there's a logical fault in my argument, or because my point goes against accepted knowledge, or because someone misclicked the upvote button? I can guess, but it would be nicer to know why.
That’s true, comment replies are always better because they give you even more information. There’s still some signal in the upvotes and downvotes, even if it’s simply “the silent majority people who lurk HN generally disagree with this statement”
Indeed, either we should scrap downvote button completely or if you wanna use it, you would need to provide reason for downvoting at least let's say 50 characters long.
Downvoting can be useful in case there is a post where you want to read every message carefully, eg a post about something you wrote. The only way I know to ensure I read every message carefully is by voting on every message (either up or down).
- okay, so this comment has positive karma, which suggests that the overall sentiment towards this point of view, technology or approach is favorable
- hmm, this comment resulted in negative karma, which suggests that it might be something controversial, perhaps this view needs to be re-examined and not held as strongly
Public opinion isn't all, of course, but if I were to suggest that every application should be serverless with no room for variety (just an example), then such a comment would most likely not have too many proponents, possibly prompting me to re-evaluate whether that's a good stance, or whether there's more nuance to it. Same for discussions of self-hosting, or containers, or programming languages or anything, really.
Thankfully, people here actually share interesting details even about the things that they agree with, or provide constructive criticisms a lot of the time, so there's many learning experiences to be had. In that regard, I haven't found many better communities.
I don't really care much for losing karma, but perhaps that's because most of the things I say aren't that controversial, or are offered in a relatively grounded manner. At worst, people might just not care and I wouldn't learn what others think or have experienced.
Only infsofar as it's a loose measure of how much my contributions resonate with the community. I generally think very highly of HN so if I say something that's widely accepted, that's affirming.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadThere is value in having pure drivel or outright false/hateful information hidden from view. It serves no purpose.
This is the age old problem of every site with a social aspect though. I don't blame HN.
There's an extremely vocal and downvote happy minority of users on HN that try to force everyone into agreement or cowardice. They will change language definitions and weaponize them against you, or try to turn you into some sort of monster for having differing opinions. Basically anything to silence opposing opinions.
There is also an extremely quiet majority of users on HN that do not wade into those conversations out of what I presume is fear of the brigade or just being exhausted from it all... but they will support your arguments via voting (the only tool at their disposal).
So... just wait out the extremists and allow the normal users to judge the quality of your arguments for what they are. Over a several hour or day long period, you will have a more accurate representation of what HN actually thinks about your arguments. It will be a roller-coaster of ups and downs along the way - that's normal.
Stop caring about the points and start caring about the quality of your arguments or unique perspectives you can communicate. Stop downvoting simply because you disagree, and start downvoting for poorly crafted, provably incorrect and/or poorly communicated arguments.
Speak your mind, no matter what it says. HN should be a place for open discussion from people of all walks of life unified by a loose commonality of a love for technology. It should not be a cesspool of unidirectional thoughts - and those who remain quiet contribute to that just as much as the brigade.
I don't 'care about' it as a score, but I do pay attention to it as an indicator that maybe there's some reply/discussion going on and I should check /threads. It's also a slightly scary proxy for time sunk into HN, I suppose!
I also make a point to thoroughly review any comments that are dead/flagged/nearly-invisible for any controversy that is otherwise in the spirit of this community. I'll happily vouch for every one of those, even if there is some consequence to my account standing.
No results for bob1029 under https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1483315141&dateRange=custom&... and I'm not about to dig through the 9000 comments about sqlite in 2016.
Downvoted. Just kidding, I can't downvote. I do care about karma, but only to reach the level at which you can downvote, only to subsequently prove the promise I made to myself to never downvote anyone on HN.
Personally, I wish that downvoting wasn't an option at all, since its only purpose is to potentially hide opinions you disagree with. Sure, the purpose is SUPPOSED to be about keeping discussions relevant, but we all know that's not what people use it for.
People can certainly use it that way, but I think it's useful for de-emphasizing irrelevant or inflammatory comments as well.
This is my problem with it, that is mainly used to hide other opinions. Even flagging gets abused for that.
I want to read other opinions, but what I don't want to read are lowe effort crap comments. They can and should be downvoted into nothingness, but downvoting well written out opinions is something I strongly disagree with.
Isn’t that what flagging is for?
It's not perfect, but I do think HN tends to actually behave decently with respect to downvotes (and I think needing 500 karma to do so is a big part of it - you have to spend the time and get familiar with the culture first)
I'll volunteer myself as an exception to "we all know". I've never thought that downvoting was meant to be used to express disagreement, and I rarely see it being used this way. But I do sometimes see a chain of comments where at least one commenter is clearly misreading / misunderstanding their conversation partner, and getting downvoted for this might feel like getting downvoted for disagreement.
same on stackoverflow, actually.
I care about making sense. Not always the case :)
People agreeing with me, not so much.
But even if I'm going to say something that few agree with, there are ways and ways of saying it. I'd rather choose the one that doesn't atract downvotes. Not because of karma, but because it's the right thing to do, both online and elsewhere.
Karma is a "gamified" way to learn something.
Personally, it hasn't stopped me from expressing myself, no.
I know myself though I have been guilty of reacting poorly to a mass downvote spam so as much as I hate to admit it, I do care about the karma.
in pirate times the fun of making someone walk the plank was to convince the victim to jump off himself with a little sword prodding as a disincentive to getting back on deck. I intent to just get a new plank each time instead of jumping into a watery grave "by choice".
Thankfully, people here actually share interesting details even about the things that they agree with, or provide constructive criticisms a lot of the time, so there's many learning experiences to be had. In that regard, I haven't found many better communities.
I don't really care much for losing karma, but perhaps that's because most of the things I say aren't that controversial, or are offered in a relatively grounded manner. At worst, people might just not care and I wouldn't learn what others think or have experienced.