I've found that putting a little bit of effort into form goes a long way in generating useful feedback.
Stated otherwise, it's about recognizing that we're not talking face-to-face, and that the characteristics of this particular mode of communication make it easy to misinterpret (often for worse) what is being said.
tl;dr: my favorite way to start a comment is "With respect, ...". It helps a lot.
There are also degrees of respect, and accordingly there are absolutely people I respect more than others. (It's not a total ordering, though, nor is it a zero-sum game.)
And frankly, this brand of tough-love is really ill-adapted to semi-anonymous written discourse. I suspect the reason people appeal to it so much has less to do with its purported righteousness than the ego boost that follows from talking down to people.
the easiest way to collect downvotes is to contradict any of PG's implicit or explicit biases. the weight of mass down-voting seems to have improved since sama has taken over and PG is blogging less.
That may seem like a flippant joke, but I assure you that my intent is that it only be about 60% that. I am not gratuitously disagreeing here, as it is my sincere opinion that when people here argue for the opposite of what a parent post says, it is more often than not because they genuinely believe that it contains an error of fact or because they wish to express their own, different opinion on the matter.
As for up-votes and down-votes, that's a measure of popularity, not correctness. You can be right about everything and still be unpopular.
I think that's because HN is full of pedants. Blunt messages don't cater to exceptions.
For me there are 3 reasons:
- I want to formulate some idea in my head and writing down something in response to other people is a way for me to organise my thoughts. In this case, I don't really care about upvotes or downvotes.
- I want to help a specific person. Sometimes people post something and I think, "I'm pretty sure I can write something that will help that person out". Again I don't care about upvotes or downvotes. It's nice if the person responds and says that it helped them, though. It's depressing when they respond and you realise that they didn't understand at all ;-)
- To practice communicating. Ideally it's on a topic that I know something about. Upvotes are my measure to see if people understand what I'm saying. Downvotes are useful to show when I'm just plain wrong (which happens from time to time).
The problem with voting systems, though, is that it becomes a proxy for approval. People try to cultivate approval and it becomes important for them to write something that gives them that approval. I'm not immune to this, but it's something that I try to avoid as best I can.
I think it is reasonable to care about downvotes to the extent that it means you should probably examine your message or the way that you are delivering your message. Given that you want to communicate, excessive downvotes mean that you are not being successful to the bulk of your audience. That should be an inward process, though. Getting angry at other people for your own inability to communicate is understandable, but not productive (I'm not implying that you do that, BTW...)
P.S. This post can be filed in category #1 ;-)
Its essentially giving the Internet a self moderation system for... the Internet.
I hate myself for have an impulse to read the comment section too, I don't know why I do it. There's nothing productive in it.
And not even that, say something in a polite way that people cannot discredit but still not like and you will get down-voted. I feel like you have to mold yourself to the hive mind if you want your stuff to be up-voted. Not sure if this is really how it is or if it is just me.
On the other hand, a lot of times when I say some feel good one liner BS I get dozens of up-votes.