The haves and have nots in the HN karma game is precisely the set of people who submit stories and the set of people who merely leave comments. A mediocre story submission trumps a great comment.

So, you have to consider that when talking about downvotes being discouraging— for people that don’t submit stories it can feel very real.

My karma is almost entirely from comments.

Having lots of karma has less to do with stories and more to do with the amount you participate in general.

I barely submit any stories, but I spend enough time on here (i.e., too much time) that I'm frequently the first one to post a substantive comment on what eventually becomes a popular thread. The system has a strong bias toward early participators, and those will disproportionately be the people who spend the most time on here.

> I think refraining from posting due to fear of downvotes is a massive disservice to HN. People should be exposed to views of all kinds. It wouldn't be very interesting if we all agreed.

No evidence for this, but I think more commonly people refrain from posting because if you have a controversial opinion you don’t get one thread of posts to reply to suddenly everyone piles on and you’re “discussing” it with 50 different people.

This is a fundamental flaw in link aggregator style social media where the community is large.

I've certainly experienced that. Depending on the complexity of the replies, I'll either reply to everyone or choose one of them to respond to.

Yeah I’ve experienced it myself, and am aware that I am often on the other side too…

It’s debilitating to have people throwing their 2c in to a growing tree thread and bounce! At least with linear vbulletin forums of old people would have to scroll past the conversation or look like idiots when they reply something totally out of context.

I think we've all done it at some point. It's usually a low hanging fruit phenomenon. Someone posts something with an obvious mistake, lots of people notice it and proceed to point it out at nearly the same time. Between refreshes of the page, it looks like you're the first one replying. Most vivid memory I have of this is someone here inadvertently telling the creator of the D programming language he didn't know enough C to comment.

> At least with linear vbulletin forums of old people would have to scroll past the conversation or look like idiots when they reply something totally out of context.

Alternatively, they'd recreate threads via extensive quoting, leading to massive in-line quote trees... Socializing is a messy affair no matter what we do, I guess.

Downvoting tells you, that this kind of comment is not something the community wants. Of course, I'll avoid posting such comments.

I'm not going to evangelize when the majority seems to prefer one-sided views.

Not at all. It tells you someone didn't like your post. Don't think it's possible to infer anything other than that. Many times I've had posts oscillate between negative and positive scores. It's very likely there are people who agree out there.

When certain comments get consistently downvoted, that’s not someone not liking your post.

What law of physics or probability prevents a comment from consistently getting downvoted due to a disagreement in opinion?

None, but downvoting because of a disagreement makes you an asshole, so that still tells you stuff about the community, or at least those active in certain threads.

There is no consistency. I have a comment at -2 right now. Over the past few days it oscillated between positive and negative scores. Someone replied to it and my response is currently +6.

In those cases its multiple people consistently disliking your posts. This doesn't necessarily make their downvotes any more valid or intelligent, or the post not worth seeing.