Hacker News Guidelines

The one thing I wish was added - either in the guidelines or as a change to the actual web UI - was replying to a comment that you're downvoting; it's frustrating both to have one's own comments downvoted without explanation, and to come across a comment that's grey without obvious reason (Was it factually incorrect? Endorsing an unpopular idea? It's not always obvious).

(I'm not saying HN should do exactly the same thing, but one example is Slashdot's system where a comment can get downvoted in a way that tags it specifically as trolling/offtopic/whatever - https://slashdot.org/faq/mod-metamod.shtml seems to describe it alright)

It's an interesting idea, but you'd end up with a situation where the worse the comment, the more discussion it generates due to the forced replies, which is sort of the opposite of what you want.

In the market of ideas you’re failing, and that’s the signal you’re getting.

It sounds like you don’t care to adjust to “the crowd”, which is fine, but then you have to deal with the consequences.

I remember when there were no upvotes and downvotes on forums, and each comment stood on it's own merits. We have to remember that for every user down voting, there are a hundred lurkers just reading. There are also a bunch of activists here on HN as on other forums, who will categorically downvote every comment by certain posters because they maybe wrote something they disagreed with several years ago.

> There are also a bunch of activists here on HN as on other forums, who will categorically downvote every comment by certain posters because they maybe wrote something they disagreed with several years ago.

Interesting. How do you know?

Only the admins would have any certain proof of users voting behaviour, but you can deduct things using your own logic. Most of my comments here will get a few upvotes in the beginning after posted and then after a day or two they are downvoted. Completely normal on-topic comments. And if you are familiar with other similar forums with a voting system like Reddit, you know there is no limit to how petty and obsessed people can be online.

I never down vote here on HN, because why should I waste my time when I can just move on?