Tell HN: Don't ask for upvotes

Of course, that might simply be my lack of imagination.

> there are people with knowledge who do this all the time and can get away with it because they know how it works.

I believe you that people say they know, but unless I'm extremely mistaken, most really don't. We see evidence all the time of people trying (but failing) to sneak around HN's anti-ring systems. That's not to say some don't succeed. Some probably do. I'd like very much to get better at catching them.

> And I see these people always show up on the front page.

When you see that, we'd like to know about it. There is a lot that we can (and will) do to investigate those cases. Don't forget that even when the ring detector misses something, there's still a lot of data we can look at if we know to. So please, everyone, email hn@ycombinator.com when someone is gaming HN.

Our goal is to have the best stories on the front page [1]. We don't all agree about what the best stories are, but I think we can agree that they're usually not ones that are only here because someone is promoting something. When we say we want people to vote for things they're interested in, that's not the kind of interest we're talking about.

> Do you just let their posts stay buried or do you give them a second chance?

Good question. We occasionally override the ring penalty when a story has clear merit for HN. (I've commented to that effect in perhaps a dozen of those threads.) But that goes for any story, not just a YC co's. And we're pretty stingy about it.

[1] That's also, by the way, our primary idea of how HN as a forum can help YC's business interests. If HN has the best quality content, the best quality people will want to be here, and some of them will start startups that YC funds. I'm not saying we do have the best quality content—there's a lot to be desired. I'm saying that this is HN's global optimum and we're not interested in trading that away for something less.

My real point is to highlight: (1) There is no advantage on HN to going through YC. The only changes are (a) You have access to the part of the site that lets you book office hours (b) You can see other YC users and (c) You can post jobs. I know of no other benefit. My co-founders can't, for example, down vote comments because they don't have the karma. (2) A significant percentage of active users are YC alums, YC alums that know me, or people who know me personally, so once something I post hits the front page I ask my co-workers and my friends to NOT up vote me. I do that because historically my items have gotten thrown off the home page and I write blog posts so people will read the posts.

Another thing is that a lot of value people like me derive from hanging out here are the random things you get to discover here - things that one wouldn't ever think about before and thus never upvote something similar. So it would be good to leave some place to splice in some random submissions that are not related to one's personal preferences.

I don't think I've seen it happen on HN, but I have seen it on other sites. I hypothesize that there is actually a craving for intelligent but unusual viewpoints on HN.

Herein lies your problem. You don't get that from disagreeing with the group or challenging the status quo; as far as I can tell, you need to have serious problems with the form, not the content of your comments to achieve that state.

I've been involved in a number of highly controversial threads, often disagreeing with the dominant view expressed in the thread, don't meet most of the standards you suggest are required to gain significant positive karma [1], and yet have over 10K karma with a current avg of 2.55.

> And are you saying that I should ignore conservations that I disagree with to protect my votes...???

I would suggest that its not disagreement with your opinions that is causing you to accumulate negative karma.

> It's a self censorship that leads to this massive amount of consensus on everything from posts to comments.

I don't see this consensus you are complaining about (and its interesting that the people complaining about supposed consensus here don't agree on what that consensus is. I suspect that's because the complaints tend to come from people that are -- likely unconsciously -- overweighting the prominence of the views that they disagree with and thus seeing a hostile consensus, and a different hostile consensus that other people see.)

[1] in this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7973724

And yes, your problem on your previous account was hellbanning, not downmodding per se. It is easy to get the two confused, because it's not easy to get clear info about either. Anyway, if you want to see my opinion on downmodding here, check my profile - it agrees with some of what you say about downvoting, but that is a separate issue to the stereotypes you're throwing out. The profile could probably do with updating, but it's been the same words for over two years (there used to be another section on humour, but that's loosened up a bit, so I removed it).

I loathe the downmodding system here, but it doesn't follow that this means the community is all about groupthink or the stereotypes you're promoting.

It's perfectly obvious that holding a minority opinion can't guarantee getting downvoted into oblivion, for the boring reason that you can hold that opinion without expressing it, and in that case no one can possibly downvote you for it.

Of course you might (very reasonably) not want to censor yourself to that extent. Very well: all you need do is have some other things you can talk interesting about besides your shortlist of pet dislikes. Then the upvotes you get from being interesting on other topics will outweigh the downvotes you allegedly get from daring not to be a libertarian. Although, I repeat: I'm not a libertarian, I've dared to express not-libertarian views more than once, and I don't recall ever getting wiped out by downvotes as a result. I've seen plenty of other not-libertarian comments that aren't invisibly light grey. So you might consider the possibility that what you got hammered for was not the mere fact of expressing an unpopular opinion, but something about how you expressed it.

Now, even the approach outlined in the previous paragraph might not be enough, if what you say about your pet dislikes gets you not merely downvoted but hellbanned. (That's the thing where your comments are invisible except to you, the moderators, and people with the "showdead" feature turned on, so you never get any karma or any replies ever again.)

But -- barring cockups and miscarriages of justice, both of which inevitably happen but are pretty rare -- that will only happen if what you say is not merely unpopular but particularly stupid, or repeatedly boring, or something else of the sort to attract the attention of a moderator and make them think "This person is not adding anything positive to HN by being there". So don't do that. Be civil. Be interesting. Don't try to turn HN into a political flamewar. It's not really that difficult.

I was a new user. I hold many minority opinions (including ones diametrically opposed to those you have named as critical points of HN consensus, particularly on the issue of political ideology), and have expressed them from very early in my time on HN. I haven't been downvoted out of visibility.

I suspect that you are both misattributing the cause of the karma hit your earlier account took and falsely generalizing from that misattribution.

I've been down-voted just a few times for expressing my opinion when I present a well-reasoned, logical argument. (Unfortunately I've been down-voted many times trying to be funny or posting a comment that's taken in an offensive way). I think you'll find that having a debate or even just a conversation with more than one side being taken is often the best way to see the whole subject.

I'm seriously thinking on putting some effort into collecting some examples and starting a discussion on the topic, because it's IMHO very bad tendency.

EDIT: Although in the case of your parent post downvotes are understandable.