There are indeed sometimes less than stellar comments, and some topics are more prone than others, those things are true. Yes people comment without reading som

There are indeed sometimes less than stellar comments, and some topics are more prone than others, those things are true. Yes people comment without reading sometimes, and yes people are contrarian sometimes. Sturgeon’s law apples independently to any group or site, regardless of the average quality there. But, it is clear the average quality on HN is much higher and not very comparable to Reddit. That said, it’s not a good idea to make assumptions about behavior or why voting is happening, it lowers the overall quality of the discussion to state those assumptions or complain about comments, and it generally doesn’t work here to tersely acknowledge something to get upvotes. I don’t know what weaponizing downvotes means, but I haven’t seen much downvoting here that can’t be explained by comments being either wrong about something or rude about something. In my experience, it does often help to patiently respond to contrarians without negative judgement and explain how and why you value good animation tricks, and what problems they solve. That will probably earn you upvotes much faster trying to repeat or agree with another comment.