It always sucks to have your insightful (in your own eyes at least) comments downvoted, just because there's a group of people who disagree with it. It's a downvote democracy, but not a true democracy because it only takes a minority to vote that way. I don't even have access to this downvote feature, I guess I don't have enough karma.

If something is unfairly downvoted, wait a while and someone else will usually upvote it again.

But it's also worth remembering they're just internet points, there's no real value. Keep contributing good stuff & you'll eventually get past the 500 karma mark. After that it's just a vanity number.

You do have access to the upvote button,so your vote can cancel out an unfair downvote.

Comments that get downvotes also don't get upvotes, so it's not just the small group who can downvotes who are causing the comments to be gray, it's also the large group who could upvotes but who chose not to do so.

Yeah, this too.

I was more lamenting the lousy comments eg. puns, comments that add nothing etc. These are possible with 0second old accounts.

Right, downvoting gets enabled when you hit 500 points, or so I remember.

Out of curiosity, could you explain what you mean by more Reddit style comments?

Because I don't think I've seen too many low effort comments here recently, or at least not much more than there were in the past.

And while political threads get a bit out of control, my experience there is that the most volatile, disruptive posts tend to get downvoted to hell before they can cause too much of an issue. So even if a certain percentage of alt-right/SJW type content is a bit more common than it was before, it tends to get rightfully buried under hundreds more thoughtful ones.

There's a lot more joke comments than there used to be even 2-3 years ago. I would date the shift to dang taking over and asking everyone to be nicer - before that HN was more caustic and the noise comments were shut down more quickly.

Comments that are only jokes, with nested replies that are word-plays are continuations of jokes. Good for a quick laugh occasionally but I prefer not to see that on HN (puns + groupthink meme jokes are not what I come to HN for).

Here, 2/4 comments on this new post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14709907

jff 9 minutes ago [-]

If anyone else is using uBlock Origin, at least for me the page displayed completely blank until I disabled uBlock temporarily.

Nice one.

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sluggg 10 minutes ago [-]

what if I want two? I can't have two third thumbs

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piyh 44 minutes ago [-]

When I was a kid, I dreamed of having a functional third arm, this seems like the first step in that direction.

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googlryas 25 minutes ago [-]

This is what my ex-gf would call my manhood. Guess why we aren't dating any more...

Example of "Reddit style comments" would be low effort jokes. Some subreddits are addressing this by using a convention where you can mark submissions with a "[serious]" tag, forbidding such replies (if there are any, they will usually be removed by the subreddit's moderators).

On HN, quite a few of them seem to get heavily downvoted (sometimes enough to mark them as dead, meaning you won't see them unless you explicitly opt in to see them).

Different subs vary. But the effect, overall, is discouraging.

Groupthink is another significant problem, particularly on topics which tend to gravitate toward ideology. Many economics subs operate this way.