If you're here for politicizing or snide remarks, then yes I hope it's hard to to get to 500.
Using only myself as an example:
* I write a comment about databases and data science that comprises hard-won insights borne out of years of experience and mistakes -> {0, 1, 2} upvotes.
* I write a throwaway comment about IBM PC-DOS -> many more upvotes (>10).
I'm not complaining. I think HN merely conforms to the broader pattern of the world.
It does have one downside: very often, soundbite comments that are naive or wrong get upvoted a lot. [0]
But then, I don't comment often and I don't care about being able to downvote, so I think I'll survive.
* Comment when you have something to contribute. The contribution can be small, even just adding your own experience. A "me too" comment will likely get downvoted. A "Me too. I often experience/feel this when..." will likely be left neutral or upvoted, depending on topic and content.
* Assume the other party in a discussion or argument is acting in good faith. Try to look for alternate interpretations for offensive or upsetting comments, and ask, if at all ambiguous. Even if it's clear the opinion is at odds with your own, don't condemn someone outright, ask why (and try to do so in a way that doesn't sound like you're setting them up).
* Tangents are okay. Responding to a particular comment but addressing the conversation is okay. Try to make it obvious when you are not addressing the person you replied to specifically. Context matters, especially for those that see the reply, and it's easy for them to assume it's supposed to be meant as a rebuttal to them when they've been seeing lots of rebuttals.
I just wanted to point out that in my case, getting points was not that easy. But I actually don't care about it, so everything is fine for me. :)
On the other hand, in general I don’t care about the occasional wave of downvotes. They’re fake internet points—-no reason to tie your HN karma to any measure of self worth. Literally anything can and will get down-votes here. Hell, just yesterday I wrote a long-ish story about some ethical issues I encountered as an engineer. No arguments or judgment passing or controversial stands—just a “here’s a little snippet of my career” and it got a couple downvotes. No need to sweat them. The advice to not complain in-thread about downvotes and not attack/question your downvoters is good advice. It’s pointless because everything, including uncontroversial comments, high quality comments, correct, incorrect—-they all get a few downs.
Sound advice. It's easy to collect some downvotes by posting about anything people feel passionate about -- there's always going to be somebody who downvotes out of dislike for your opinion. Also, I believe criticizing certain national governments attracts an outsized share of downvotes / flags.
These exist, but I'm not sure it's as cut and dry as that. Sometimes arguments you've seen, or made yourself, that were open ended and/or asking for discussion get downvoted, but sometimes it's just a week later and they don't. I think a lot of it has to do with the context people see it in, their own state of mind, and whether someone happened to take up reasoned discussion on the topic before downvotes started accumulating.
Put another way, I think there's a lot of people that see someone looking to talk about a topic and immediately assume they are looking for an opening to express their outside views rather than explore the topic (which is not fair to assume, IMO). Seeing people discuss that topic rationally stalls or negates that knee-jerk reaction.
In other words, it's a crap shoot (but there are strategies for broaching these subjects that work better than others).
Rudeness and pointless ramblings get downvoted quickly, which is likely a model learned quickly by newcomers. Arguing an unpopular view is unlikely to get beaten hard -- I do not recall ever getting more than -3 or so on a comment (but maybe I am just a conformist).
the whole system is rigged and it's just not appreciating your awesomeness. maybe you're seeing a pattern that's not there? might it be your opinions that are flawed? or maybe your communication skills or style are left wanting? i don't know but those things are certainly possibilities too.
you didn't actually make an argument about what you think the "similar views" are, how the mechanism works, who's involved, or anything worthy of consideration and discussion.
might that be representative of the problem right there?
They can be good ideas, bad ideas, horrendous ideas... Regardless, if SV thinks its good, then it passes muster here.
I've said quite a few things that have either scored low or negative, even if they sane and cogent and direct. They just challenge the precepts that are held holy in the 'Valley.
That is the distribution of everyone who hit the site last month at all, regardless of how much they used it. If we weight the numbers by the number of days they used HN, then US has 44%, Europe 33%, Can/Aus/NZ 8%, India 3%, China 2%. And Silicon Valley is 8%. That's surprisingly low, given how many people assume that HN == SV.
You may not be the most unbiased judge of that.
(That said, I almost never downvote.)
I don't think it works exactly the way you think it does.
I will add that being the first woman on the leaderboard is not essential to the point that you can get a lot of karma and not be part of the echo chamber. But inevitably that is the detail that gets focused on, as if proving that I am not the first woman (or questioning my assertion, because no proof to the contrary has ever been offered when I get asked this) somehow invalidates my actual point.
My other handle has 25k karma. This one has over 3k. I don't in any way whatsoever participate in an echo chamber.
If it's not essential, and you don't want people to focus on it, why did you bring it up? It was the only interesting part of your comment (to me). I don't really care if HN is an echo chamber or not.
> as if proving that I am not the first woman (or questioning my assertion, because no proof to the contrary has ever been offered when I get asked this) somehow invalidates my actual point.
I actually dont care if you were or were not the first woman or if it was someone else, I was just curious about how you knew on an anonymous forum. But go ahead, be mad about it.
Your blog post is interesting, so thanks for linking that.
If you want a community that is hard to get started in look at StackExchange. You can't even comment until you've gotten quite a few points.
One reason for me to stay here is the diversity (and civility) of the comments, I don't think it's too bad. Another favourite read of mine is Arstechnica, but the comments there don't reach the quality of the comments on HN, imho.