I suspect I'm not alone in wishing you had cast your vote in a way that mattered. Hopefully in hindsight it's clear no one "listened" to your deep moral convictions (or whatever) that led you to vote for that third party or to led your friends to vote blank top of ballot entries.

You simply fell prey to a focused disinformation campaign that actively tried to prevent intelligent voters from voting and that worked, probably well enough to influence the outcome of the election. That's a hard pill to swallow and you'll probably tell me and yourself that of course that's not what happened, but it wasn't an accident you felt that way. The Russians are very, very good at disinformation and always have been.

You're smart enough to accumulate huge karma here on HN so I'm sure you're smart enough to figure out how voting works. Hopefully you'll manage to fight the confirmation bias you'll likely look for to justify your past actions and be able to make your future actions matter. A great many people wish they had your vote. Please make it count.

This logic doesn't really work out...it seems to also hold that everyone who voted for HRC also voted in a way that didn't matter, so they might as well have just stayed home (the outcome would be no different).

Also, it really reads as just a not-very-thinly-veiled accusation that people who do not vote for the candidate that you want to win are stupid and/or naive. I don't think there's anything wrong with saying that, necessarily, but you might as well just say it. I disagree with both the rhetoric and the conclusion entirely, but your opinion is what it is.

Personally, I think this kind of thinking leads to the negative outcomes that pervade our political system. Even if third parties have no chance of winning, the idea that they might not be able to bank on the votes of people scared of the "wrong lizard" might force them to moderate their political stands.

The election had two candidates that together received just shy of 100% of the vote and that split that vote very nearly 50/50. The rest of the names on the ballot were spoilers, not candidates. That outcome was not a surprise and no one seriously expected anyone other than those two candidates to win or have any other impact than spoiling the vote of one or both of the winners. Which of thse two candidates would win was not known until the election, because polling is difficult and presidential races in the US tend to be close, so the voting was necessary and no votes for either serious candidate were wasted. All of that is true for every US presidential election in recent memory.

And just like in every previous election, no one "listened" to the voters who voted for the spoiler candidates. No one said "if HRC or DT had just done x they would have gotten more of the Green Party or Libertarian voters." People who vote for spoiler candidates self select themselves into a group where they guarantee the winning and losing major parties don't care at all what they think. Voting for a spoiler candidate means the major candidates don't have to care what you think, and they don't, so you end up with even less influence than if you had voted for one or the other of the potential winners.

Before you get lecturey, maybe make sure parent was voting in a place where casting a different vote had a chance of directly mattering?

My third party vote in CA arguably has a bigger effect than a major party vote in CA, for the presidency in the general election.

Most parts of the US are close enough that a "major victory" or a "guaranteed outcome" is measured at the level of a few percentage points. Even in the hopelessly gerrymandered house elections coming up in 2018 there may be as many as 70 seats in play, precisely because even a "safe" seat is only safe by a comparatively small percentage margin.

Geographically, "most parts of the US" are fairly close. If you live in one of those parts, vote accordingly.

By population, that's substantially less true - nothing I do in the ballot box is going to make a dent in a 60-40 split in CA, and quite a few will have to think just like me before it does. If you're in one of those parts, vote accordingly.