> People are afraid to make comments that might had value but doesn't match the HN culture. I know this affects me and suppresses my willingness to post. The

> People are afraid to make comments that might had value but doesn't match the HN culture. I know this affects me and suppresses my willingness to post. The result is that I keep most of my shitty comments to myself. I behave much worse on other discussion forums. For example, if I have a countervailing opinion, on other forums often I'll just post it, and the way I'll post it will be designed to make the people that would disagree with them (prototypically, havers of idiotic European political opinions) unhappy by making them witness opinions that they disagree with. I do that with less frequency here -- here, I'll try to make it palatable and relatable in a way that's not totally saturated with spergacious obnoxiousness. I guess most of the reason is just the general expectation of professionalism that's maintained here, not specific fear of negative karma, but that atmosphere is not maintained by upvotes. (In fact, my most-upvoted comments, not that I have many, are almost always pop vacuouity that I think should have been downvoted.) I think a lot of other people here would post a lot worse, too, without downvotes and without the visible "fade" effect. Edit: For example, here's a comment of mine that was rightfully downvoted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8867833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8867833 My opinion is right, of course, but it could have been much better presented. And here's a comment where I got downvoted for disagreeing with the thread-local hivemind: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8867309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8867309 So what if I got downvoted! Sometimes that's what you get when you engage with idiots. It's not the end of the world.