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Ask HN: Why do you care so much that you're being down voted?
5 points by jyap on July 16, 2012 | hide | past | favorite | 17 comments
A pet peeve and growing trend on Hacker News is someone getting down voted for a comment, then writing another comment asking why they were down voted and then an ensuing discussion as to why they were down voted. Discussions of being down voted are largely off topic and are just plain annoying. Please stop caring so much about how much "karma" points you have. "Karma" is just a virtual reputation system. Please just stick to writing well thought out comments. Why do you care so much that you're being down voted?


For me it's not the karma, it's the implication that my well-intentioned comment that was intended to add value has been considered by someone in "the community" to be the opposite, and to be of negative value.

If that happens then there is a mis-match between my understanding and reality, and as a mathematician, engineer, hacker, and general learner for life, I want to know why. When people disagree with me it's an opportunity to learn, and I want to take that opportunity, especially from people who have chosen to self-identify with this "community."


Encouraging a comment per down vote would have a strong negative impact on the readability of the site. I don't know what the daily number of down votes is, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's greater than the current number of comments. The on-topic comments would be overwhelmed by the meta-conversation.

But there definitely is value in providing this feedback. I think the solution is to offer a quieter way of doing so than via a globally visible comment. This feedback should be public to maintain civility and concision, but should be outside of the main stream of the conversation.

My proposal is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4209304


The difficult thing is assessing your opinion whether it was downvoted because your opinion was fallacious or someone doesn't agree with it.

It does cause some problems with content, most notably bandwagons and mundane comments out of fear.


Why is it not okay for people to try and find out why they're being downvoted, but it's okay for you to post a whole topic talking about how annoying you find it?

In both cases the person, be it the downvotee or you, is trying to discover the reason for a behaviour.

Edit: it's also considered poor form to order people to modify their behaviour to match your particular preferences.


It's not poor form. The Hacker News Guidelines state (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html): Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

It is poor form to not abide by the house rules.


I said it was poor form to order people to modify their behaviour to match your particular preferences.

The house rules mention complaining about downvotes. As you've found out, people are wanting to learn why they've been downvoted, they're trying to understand. That's not complaining.


That's a theory, but in practice it's often just a very thin veil for complaining about being downvoted.

Complaining about being downvoted earns a near-automatic downvote from me. It's the exact opposite of contributing something useful.

I hate it when I get downvoted, but I suck it up. Sometimes I knew it was coming, and sometimes it's only temporary and the comment ends up with a good score.

But regardless of how or why, I take it and move on.


If someone downvotes me, I would indeed like to know why.

If someone downvotes me because they disagree with me, I would prefer they state their disagreement rather than downvote.

If someone downvotes me because they think I'm being rude, I would like to know what it is about my comment that they consider rude.

If someone downvotes me for being an Apple/Google/Microsoft fanboy, I would like the opportunity to disabuse them of that notion.

If someone downvotes me because my comment is incorrect, I would like to know what the truth is.

Downvoting is sometimes used as a lazy way of saying "This is a poor comment" (I know, I do it myself sometimes when I am tired). But without saying why a comment is poor, it is itself a poor form of feedback.

I might come back to a comment I wrote the day before, and in a different frame of mind be able to see why it has been downvoted. But when I can't see why, it is frustrating.

I don't really care about my HN karma. It's just a number that tends to go up sporadically.


In general, when I see a greyed out comments, I can understand why they were downvoted.

But I occasionally see downvoted comments that seem totally legitimate. If someone feels negatively about a comment (for reasons other than it being nonsense or off-topic), the mature thing to do is to explain their disagreement with the comment.

I agree that asking "why the downvote" is rarely productive. But downvoters should explain their point of view in addition to (or instead of) downvoting.


From the early comments I think I linked the concept of being downvoted to "karma" too strongly.

This was because the Hacker News Guidelines state (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html): Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

My assumption is that people had read this and largely obey the guidelines.


If it's not clear, I will ask why I was down voted in order to improve the quality of my future comments.

> Discussions of being down voted are largely off topic and are just plain annoying.

They are pretty easy to ignore: just don't read the child comments of greyed out comments.


Albert Einstien was always downvoted for not being apt in acedemics :) I would thank my downvoter (and ask him to correct me), man,thats how you learn.


I only see an upvote button, what gives?


You don't have enough karma to down vote. There isn't a specific place that tells one what that karma is and I don't have the answer since I still can not down vote either.

I've heard it's the flat-rate karma of 500. I've also heard that it's a moving target based on how many users or how much karma is currently out in the world.

If it is calculated and not flat, it specifically hurts new users while giving older users more power.


So a downvote button is an unlockable, interesting. Where did you learn this?


It's in the FAQ (http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).


Personally, I don't care if I'm downvoted. Given that I don't usually say incredibly stupid things here, when I'm downvoted it is almost always a temporary phenomenon (most often it seems like fanboy kneejerk downvoting because I said that whatever company/product they love might not be perfect) that eventually corrects itself, so asking about it wouldn't really serve any purpose.

I have to admit that when people do say incredibly stupid things (and not just things I disagree with, but really stupid/unhelpful comments), I love it when they complain about the downvoting in a subsequent post because then I can downvote them twice. I'm not sure if that is proper HN etiquette or not, but I'm guilty of it.




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