The vanishing civility: The game of jerks, bozos and assholes

That said, getting past valuing fake internet points is a great exercise. I use reddit a fair amount and some of the subs I'm on are far more capricious than HN with the downvotes, often using it as an echo chamber reinforcement tool. I consider it good to acclimate yourself to paying the price for voicing unpopular opinions (without being a jerk obviously).

I love that you said this out loud because it's candid and vulnerable. I feel the same way, and spend disproportionate amounts of time worrying and feeling insecure about down votes, when I hardly even think about up votes. Especially if I really truly try to contribute something and use a positive tone and get downvoted without any visible disagreement or explanation.

I have yet to cast a down vote because of this - I noticed how much it affected me inexplicably, and I don't want to pass that around, even if most people are impervious to it. I don't think I'm somehow being virtuous by not down voting -- some ugly comments I'm delighted to see being downvoted. But I'm not sure down votes are a necessary part of the system since things percolate to the top with up votes.

Maybe getting people to downvote less was the intent of the down vote karma threshold. Maybe it's working really well, I don't know. But that also makes receiving down votes sting just a tiny bit more.

What's funny about this to me is that it's meaningless. Why do I even care about karma? I have no idea. Once you have down vote power, what does it earn? Not much.

> I'd much rather everything just be anonymous. That would be easier.

I'd like to hear more about this. My working assumption has long been that anonymity makes bad behavior worse and more frequent overall, both comments and downvotes. Is it because you'd care less about your own profile & karma, or because you've seen anonymity produce more civility, or something else?

One way to think about downvotes is to keep them symmetric with upvotes. When I first came to HN, I expected downvotes to be asymmetrically reserved for people being wildly factually incorrect, or wildly negative. But, maybe if you upvote something on a whim because you lightly agree with it, it should be equally acceptable to downvote something because you lightly disagree with it. I don't do that, but I don't have any compelling reasons not to, aside from I don't like getting downvoted, it still feels more serious than upvotes.

When do you upvote things? I upvote for a number of different reasons including but not limited to when someone says something funny, contributes something valuable or different than others, posts data or relevant links worth bookmarking, says something that I agree with, shows a high level of nerdery and/or expertise in a weird subject matter, has a great attitude or meaningfully positive spin on something, etc. And as long as it's tastefully done, I'll even upvote the occasional correction or sarcastic comment.

I also tend to upvote people who engage with me, and respond to things I've said. Lately, it has been especially important for me personally to upvote people who are being critical or disagreeing with me, even if they're pushing my buttons. If my goal is for the conversation I start to bubble upward, then upvoting the thread is better than downvoting.

So, I'm only one person and I don't even have a consensus myself about when to upvote. ;) I don't personally expect consensus on when to downvote, other than a general wish that people use it judiciously - and I have to say that by and large, that is what I see going on. It's uncommon that I see or experience unfair or unreasonable downvoting.

> You need a certain level of karma to even give downvotes, so maybe the assumption is that people at "that level" should already know to how to use them.

I can only speak from my own experience and say that my ideas about how to vote changed between when I first started here and when I finally earned the ability to downvote. Not having the ability to downvote for a while did help me learn how to say more things that contributed rather than get stuck in the eddies of Internet arguments. If I'd had the ability to downvote from day 1, I would have used it a lot. Since I didn't have it, by the time I got there, I now don't see the need to use it, and so I don't.

So far as I can tell, there is no way for me to know when a person has responded to a comment of mine other than keeping my account page opening and refreshing to see if anyone has posted a response to me. Some means of being told, hey, someone posted a response to your comment 'X' would be nice.

That and there's a dearth of sex talk. Get us more of that you delicious beast.

Looks like incivility to me.

In my humble opinion, more often than not, when a techie refers to another commenter as an "asshole" they simply mean that they dislike the other commenter's politics or lack of left-leaning political correctness. You see, most techies espouse leftist views, which are rarely challenged in public because most media lean left. When they come across real-world opinions held by a large percentage of the population, they flip out and call the offender(s) "jerks, bozos and assholes."

I'm on the other side. I see the entire original post and most of the related comments on HN as examples of intolerance of truly diverse opinions. Those who would flag-kill differing opinions are the "assholes". Those incapable of seeing their own bias are likely "bozos" or "jerks". In short, several of the self-congratulatory commenters on HN fail to understand that the words "asshole", " jerk", "bozo" apply squarely to them.

I had a recent post which got 5 quick upvotes then was flag-killed for failing to hew to feminist orthodoxy and the feminine imperative. That's how intolerance is done.