Ask HN: Is it fair game to downvote someone's comments indiscriminately?

Re:Ask HN: Is it fair game to downvote someone's comments in... by nkurz on Sunday April 26, 2015 @03:54AM (#9440932)

I feel I'm fairly impartial here, as I regularly vote up comments by members that you list as victims. I looked at all the posts you linked, and did not see any evidence for the pattern that you claim. This doesn't mean you are wrong, but I think it at least means it isn't as obvious as you feel it is.

  > Let's agree on one assumption: largely, comments
  > on HN will be voted upon fairly.

I see no strong reason to make that assumption, and further doubt the existence of a universally agreed upon definition of "fairly". I think the simpler explanation is that some comments that you (and I) think are good are downvoted by others who think they are bad.

Perhaps some of these are "vendetta" votes against the individual, but I think most downvotes are based on the content and tone of each individual comment. While there are sometimes extreme short-term swings to the negative, I think the process tends to balance out with extra upvotes for comments the majority considers (rightly or wrongly) unfairly grayed out.

But in my opinion, the result is majority rule, rather than anything universal or conspiratorial.

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Re:Ask HN: Is it fair game to downvote someone's comments in... by pen2l on Sunday April 26, 2015 @10:37AM (#9441901)

So, after I made that comment, something pretty fantastic happened: for the links I provided, the rankings changed pretty significantly. Eli's comments were mostly at the very bottom for the links, now they are at the top.

I was going to make an edit note pointing out this change since having made my comment, but chose not to.

Trust me, the rankban mechanisms exist, some really smart users did some tests to confirm it, and a lot of people are in the know by now. We had this dispute about hellbans, shadowbans, and slowbans, that was much easier to prove. Rankban has been studied pretty extensively at this point, and everyone has been convinced of it. The current effort is to study the downvoteban and policy changes.

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Re:Ask HN: Is it fair game to downvote someone's comments in... by bjourne on Tuesday April 28, 2015 @09:04AM (#9451914)

Why do you assume that? It could just as easily be someone holding a grudge against the user whose comments to you link to and habitually downvotes him or her. That the comments got upvotes after you linked to them isn't strange either; you drawn attention to that they were unfairly downvoted so people want to correct that.

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