Is there a problem with HN?
I have been coming here for over a year. One time there was a thread about a topic I was familiar with. I posted a comment and people down voted it. I posted links proving my point and the majority down voted it. So that left me with negative teens. I posted the truth but it was unpopular here. Once you have negative numbers it looks like its impossible to get out because your replies are hidden. So we exclude people who we don't agree with. We shut them out. This is not the America I grew up in. Its a sad commentary on USA. I see it in other systems. These are American dominated systems that exclude people unless they are like us. Some even ban foreign IP address. Maybe its a trade war. Maybe its an elitist attitude, I don't know. But it is ugly. Perhaps its the new ugly American.
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10 comments
| 8 points
| on HN
)
- comments critical of Google
- comments praising the chinese government
- comments advocating a vegan lifestyle
- comments critical of Joel Spolsky
- comments that disagree with PG in the same thread and that seem not to have been well thought out.
- comments critical of the Gates Foundation
- comments advising young hackers not to attend college
- comments containing the word "bro"
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2182852
If your comment went against a generally accepted viewpoint and you tried to use links to pseudoscientific sources to back it up, then yes, you'd run afoul of most people here and be downvoted. The bad science surrounding this issue is a particular pet peeve of many people. You say "I posted links proving my point" which leads me to believe that maybe you're very set in a viewpoint that most people don't find credible.
Of course, since I don't know what your original comment was, this is all speculation.
Keep in mind that although some comments don't really deserve to be negative, most of them really do. It's reasonable for the site to set a standard for quality and save readers' time by graying out things that are probably not worth the time to read. It won't be perfect.
There are also different shades of gray in comments. A comment at -3 is still a "readable" gray, and I've been known to bump comments back up if they contribute usefully to the discussion. But that's just one vote, putting it back to -2, which will still be below many people's thresholds. Sometimes not enough people bother to join in to "rescue" a reasonable comment; it happens, it's unfortunate, but that's how it goes.
Really the only way to fix these things is to post in "Feature Requests" at the bottom of the page with your ideas for what would make a better critique system. For instance, maybe it should become harder to downvote and require a reason, e.g. flame/inaccurate/whatever.
I would make a new account, make a few vanilla comments that people will agree with and get karma to 10-30 to prevent this from happening.
I've seen some number of people with reasonable contributions who appear to be caught unaware by this for months or perhaps a year in some cases. I'd consider it a defect, but ? I see it more often on normal folks than spammers maybe 80/20
There are other situations where I am confused by seeing a normal contributor's comment as dead (different than deleted) out of the blue, they have +karma and won't post dead in the future.
I am certainly no social.media.community digerati though, it may work best over all.
TBH on the whole HN doesn't strike me as US-centric. Let me qualify that. It is, but far less than other similar sites and seems to me to have quite a cadre of people from across the globe.
It would be nice if you had to make a little comment about why you downvoted?