> "Upvotes aren't your friend"... one way to look at it is your balance of upvotes is your reputation capital, once you have enough, you can afford to spend som

> "Upvotes aren't your friend"... one way to look at it is your balance of upvotes is your reputation capital, once you have enough, you can afford to spend some posting against the prevailing wisdom when you judge you should, without being silenced. Compensating for the downvotes, you mean. Good point. HN downvotes used to be annoying but now I chalk it to the silent revolt of the intellectually incurious. And others. It’s not specific to HN, but to most groups that seem to consider themselves ‘intellectual’. The downvoting of certain subjects(I have a list. It’s very predictable.) is a subconscious upvote to their ego. That’s why it’s anonymous. Also: I agree with the initial point re being anonymous, I don’t think that’s possible on HN because the YC applications are tied to user handle. So there is some form of self censoring going on. Because. Image.