Yes, preservation of the “house style” is an explicit goal of HN’s design and moderation. Preventing newcomers from “democratically” hijacking the forum and turning it into something else is something it’s explicitly built to thwart.

It's not hard to get to 500 thru purely technical commentary.

If you're here for politicizing or snide remarks, then yes I hope it's hard to to get to 500.

I find that true technical commentary is often less appreciated than superficial technical statements.

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]

[0] http://danluu.com/hn-comments/

Anecdotally I find the largest factors affecting number of upvotes are time of day and how recently the thread has been on the front page.

Comments higher up on the page also get more upvotes. Not everyone reads all of the comments and you get this effect.

dat true!

I don't find it easy personally, my most upvoted comment has 14 points, most are under 4 points.

But then, I don't comment often and I don't care about being able to downvote, so I think I'll survive.

It takes a while in the beginning, then you learn what works and what doesn't, which thankfully aligns fairly well with the community values as I see them. Here's a distillation of how I see them:

* 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.

Sure, but most of the time I don't feel like I have things relevant to add to the discussion, I'm more of the lurker type.

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. :)

I believe the top comment in an high voted thread can get 100+ points but winning the thread is extremely difficult. In almost 6y I only was able to make it 3 or 4 times. The quality is really high and it's amazing how there is always somebody in a better position to comment it.

Comments are worth a point, so as long as you're not posting comments that are regularly downvoted, just participating will get you there.

No, the default point doesn't count towards your karma.

It's still true that just participating will get you there. I'm pretty sure my median comment has 2 points.

Aaaaaaaand now this comment is my most upvoted comment. Obviously.

...or by submitting some awesome content once in a while.

For all the complaints about the hivemind, I see a broader range of opinions here than anywhere else. Perhaps the reason for complaints is that the visibly broad range of opinions creates an expectation that any reasonable opinion will be tolerated, when in fact some reasonable opinions will be suppressed by the community. In such a generally open context, this suppression seems particularly unjust.

In general true, but there are a certain few “lightning rod” topics for which there is only a limited set of HNCorrect opinions. No matter how well written/sourced/argued your comment is, if it goes against the group belief it will be buried. I just avoid these topics altogether now—it’s not worth the time spent writing.

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.

> In general true, but there are a certain few “lightning rod” topics for which there is only a limited set of HNCorrect opinions. No matter how well written/sourced/argued your comment is, if it goes against the group belief it will be buried. I just avoid these topics altogether now—it’s not worth the time spent writing.

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.

That or any google proguct. They seem to have the forum locked down tight. Look at the posts that rise after a while in any AMP, Gmail, or Talk thread. Its a clear shift when workers come online. I often wonder how many people are employed to influence and steer technical discussion on sites like this.

Certain topics are predictsbly for/against on HN. Nuclear power is one such topic where for example arguments against Thorium reactors gets HN voters up in arms and prompt downvotes.

> No matter how well written/sourced/argued your comment is, if it goes against the group belief it will be buried.

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).

Sure, it does act as a stabilizer, but IMO it affects discussion style much more than opinions expressed. Which is, to me, is a good thing.

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).

That argument seems wrong to me; the subset of the community with karma > 500 is as fractious and divided as the community as a whole.

it's interesting to note that that's exactly the kind of position you might have if your opinions are just not that great.

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?

It's called groupthink. And I've heard many people outside the SV scene complain precisely about SV groupthink issues.

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.

The HN community is overwhelmingly not in SV. Less than 10% by many measures.

Do you folks have any anonymized demographics data? I’d love to see it over time in particular, since I’m guessing early on it was much more SV. When I travel and am in a vastly different time zone (like say to Europe or Asia), I notice the active participants on HN are fairly different. Is 10% by viewership, accounts, activity, all of the above?

I was just looking at this. 5% of "users" (it depends how you define a user who isn't logged in) last month were in SV. A third were in the US, a third in Europe, 8% in Canada/Australia/NZ, 6% in India, 3% in China.

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.

That's way more Europe MAU percentage than I was expecting. Thanks, and good to know!

> I've said quite a few things that have either scored low or negative, even if they sane and cogent and direct

You may not be the most unbiased judge of that.