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I'm surprised at downvotes too. I suspect there are lots of n00b on HN who thinks downvotes is way to express disagreement. I use downvote for not-nice and spam

by sytelus 11y ago

I'm surprised at downvotes too. I suspect there are lots of n00b on HN who thinks downvotes is way to express disagreement. I use downvote for not-nice and spammy comments. If I want to express disagreement, I would just put that in reply. But apparently new HN population does things differently.

rspeer 11y ago
Is pg a n00b? Long ago, he said, "I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
- sytelus 11y ago
  I'm surprised at that comment because his writings had given me a different impression. PG's view basically means that people with different opinions and minority views would be punished heavily by the community effectively leading to strip them out of all karma. This guideline would encourage people for groupthink and make them hesistant to offer any perspective that might be remotely perceived as controversial. I truly hope pg's above view was transient and has evolved.
  - fapjacks 11y ago
    Doesn't it, though? I see reasonable but unpopular opinions blasted into background color all the time. I make it a point to upvote these posts, even if I disagree with the original opinion, because of this behavior shaping that takes place on HN these days. And if I didn't know better, I'd say it was a conspiracy. :P
dasil003 11y ago
I believe after several decades of observation of communities like this one, that it is a character flaw of some programmers that because they are good at talking to computers—which are in fact totally objective interpreters of code—that the same attribute applies to their person. However at some point we are all emotional and biased creatures, and the distinction between disagreement and illogical argument or even outright factual innacuracy can at times blur significantly. What I'm saying is that before you form a knee-jerk rationalization about the reason a downvote happened (because of course I do the same thing), stop and consider that there's at least a 50% chance that your argument is not in fact as airtight as your brain's emotional connection to it, and perhaps you are being downvoted for reasons totally unrelated to what you so hastily ascribe to the anonymous voters.

by sytelus 11y ago

rspeer 11y ago

Is pg a n00b? Long ago, he said, "I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

sytelus 11y ago
I'm surprised at that comment because his writings had given me a different impression. PG's view basically means that people with different opinions and minority views would be punished heavily by the community effectively leading to strip them out of all karma. This guideline would encourage people for groupthink and make them hesistant to offer any perspective that might be remotely perceived as controversial. I truly hope pg's above view was transient and has evolved.
- fapjacks 11y ago
  Doesn't it, though? I see reasonable but unpopular opinions blasted into background color all the time. I make it a point to upvote these posts, even if I disagree with the original opinion, because of this behavior shaping that takes place on HN these days. And if I didn't know better, I'd say it was a conspiracy. :P

dasil003 11y ago

I believe after several decades of observation of communities like this one, that it is a character flaw of some programmers that because they are good at talking to computers—which are in fact totally objective interpreters of code—that the same attribute applies to their person. However at some point we are all emotional and biased creatures, and the distinction between disagreement and illogical argument or even outright factual innacuracy can at times blur significantly. What I'm saying is that before you form a knee-jerk rationalization about the reason a downvote happened (because of course I do the same thing), stop and consider that there's at least a 50% chance that your argument is not in fact as airtight as your brain's emotional connection to it, and perhaps you are being downvoted for reasons totally unrelated to what you so hastily ascribe to the anonymous voters.