The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)

Yes, facetious and a little smug—but the rest of your comment is wildly off base from my perspective. Saying that downvoting does no good for HN is like saying white blood cells do no good for an organism. It's critical to the immune system. Yes, downvotes can do harm, just like white blood cells can. But try living without them.

Downvotes should be weighted by the voter history, e.g. someone who just downvotes should have vote weight say than someone who is more balanced.

> You need mechanisms for helping people learn "This is not welcome on HN. This is not how we do things here."

Can we use flags for this purpose?

Problem is even though a comment does not violate any rule, it gets down-voted as hell if you say something that majority of people would not like. e.g there are posts about hyped programming languages, go check out down-voted comments, most of them does not deserve to be down voted.

There some topics, these topics have “fan-boys”, so even a comment is constructive, it gets down-voted.

You already show disagreement with comments. If a comment violates a rule, we can flag it. If a comment does not get up-votes, it moves to bottom of the page. So, I think down-votes don’t add any value to HN.

As someone who gets downvoted probably more than average, I don't agree with you. Downvotes are the least problematic way for people to tell me they have some problem with my comment and minimizes the fallout from me having to try to navigate gender politics as part of the mix.

It would be vastly worse for men to only be able to express sexist garbage by openly attacking me and trying to find some plausible excuse for hostility that is sometimes rooted in "She won't date me!" basically.

I'm a very controversial figure in part because I am getting healthier when that is not supposed to be possible and the world generally has a big issue with me because of that reality. HN has handled my "disruptive' presence better than any other forum I've been on. I've been banned from several forums and I've had mods elsewhere tell me that the abusive treatment heaped on me by others that was a clear violation of the stated rules was not the problem, the problem was somehow my behavior.

Since I'm not making any of that up, I'm kind of painted into a corner here socially and I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to not end up essentially murdered over it, like Semmelweis was.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

I do everything in my power to behave in accordance with the rules and blah blah blah, but I'm a woman and HN was as much as 98 percent male when I joined and I'm getting healthier when that isn't supposed to be possible and so forth. And HN is the only forum that is able to cope with that constructively and help me talk to people who are knowledgeable about areas of science that are pertinent to my needs as someone trying to survive in the face of an incurable genetic disorder.

I say all kinds of things that are not "popular" or even socially acceptable and as long as I am not violating the rules of civility, the mods here don't have a problem with me being here and that's extremely unusual. Most mods are all too happy to just get rid of me as the easy answer to their problem while not caring that this is de facto a polite way to quietly commit murder against someone whose crime boils down to "I am a scientist who is doing cutting edge work and my credentials include I'm a former homemaker and spent years homeless."

It sucks to be me. It sucks majorly for a long list of reasons.

And most forums find me intolerable and HN is willing to let me stay and that's literally life saving for me.

So I feel strongly that I am the ultimate test case for how well their rules work. The entire forum can literally think you are nuts and you can say things here that people literally believe is you being a deluded fruitcake making shit up, and if you behave you can stay.

So I think they are doing something amazingly well that's incredibly hard to do and I'm a huge fan in part because it has helped to save my life.

I'm sure there is room for improvement. I'm also equally sure no one else on the planet does it better.

Some of my stupidest posts get upvoted through the roof. Posts which I put in a lot of work on? Mixed bag.

Partly this is a first-poster thing. If you post early, then you'll either get a lot of up or down votes. Take time to post, and well, might get nothing.