Hacker News Guidelines

My pet peeve is:

"Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

Unless the context of the discussion is about voting (such as with these threads), I have a quick trigger finger when it comes to voting down comments that talk about votes.

Even if someone is asking "why am I getting down voted" or "If you are going to vote down, tell me why" complaints are annoying and pointless. Sometimes I explain, but it's not worth it, so I just vote down comments that do this.

Tangent

See, when someone does answer why they are getting voted down, the person being voted down will generally argue with the person answering, which just means you didn't want to learn why people were voting you down, and rather, you wanted to argue. If you just thanked the person for answering "why are people voting down my comment", you'd get the answer more often. But answering that question is generally NOT an invitiation to argue the merits of the reasoning for voting down.

For example, let's say I know you are getting voted down because I've rouintely see your comment get voted down because a group of people think it's wrong for whatever reason. So, I answer: "You are getting voted down because people think you are wrong." If you come back and argue with me, saying you aren't wrong... you've missed the entire exchange. I'm not necessarily arguing for one side or another, I'm simply explaining why you are getting voted down. Feel free to disagree with the reasoning, but it doesn't make my answer wrong.

End Tangent

Anyways, if you want to know why you are being voted down by people you respect, do your research. And if you don't respect the people voting you down, why does it matter what they think?

This is in the same category as people on dating sites complaining about wanting to know why they don't get replies to their messages or people wanting an explanation of why a company chose to hire someone else and not them. They say they just want feedback so they can get better, but 999 times times out of 1000, the reality is they start a fight if you actually give feedback. They don't want to improve. They just got their feelings hurt and want a chance to defend themselves. You're not going to please everyone all of the time. Just forget about it and move on. Want to do your own sanity the best favor you can ever do it? Other than maybe one proofread immediately after submission, don't go back and look at your past comments at all. You can't worry about whether they were downvoted if you never even know they were downvoted.

> you didn't want to learn why people were voting you down, and rather, you wanted to argue

It's possible to want both.

I've gotten downvoted for comments I probably never should have made (or at least should have heavily edited), and I understand. In fact I've made comments where I later thought "that should get downvoted" and been weirdly disappointed when it got upvoted instead ("I should have done a better job with that comment for it to deserve those upvotes"). I don't ask those people to explain their downvotes. I'm not proud of everything I've posted and those downvotes improve the discourse. In fact in reading these comments, I now suspect my account has that shadow rate-limiting flag on it and deserves it.

On the other hand, I've also gotten some truly inexplicable downvotes. Downvotes that I could not imagine anyone doing in good faith. Those downvotes do not improve the discourse and the community, they're simply infuriating and foster ill will, and these guidelines are all about fostering good will. If the person even made an effort to explain why I was downvoted, sure, I might continue to argue with them, but I would also appreciate the explanation and accept and understand their downvote.

Everybody gets inexplicable, incoherent downvotes. They tend, in the main, to get balanced out by upvotes. This is a part of why we don't waste time talking about them; they are a nonproblem.

I much appreciate when a seemingly 'surprise' downvote (of anybody; think I've only experienced one) has somebody follow up with something like "You're getting downvoted because…" or "Don't know why you're getting downvoted. This seems relevant because…". Both help me decide how to better fit to expectations.

Even if the given reason is not something I entirely agree with, reading why others might feel the way they do helps. With more samples, I can even get a feel for whether a given response was the respondents' personal interpretation/preference or representative of the community as a whole.

For downvotes that seem self-explanatory, I admit I do tend to skip over the replies.