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Low quality comments are consistently downvoted without remorse. Your response added nothing substantive or interesting for people to read on the comment page.
by escape_goat 11y ago
Low quality comments are consistently downvoted without remorse. Your response added nothing substantive or interesting for people to read on the comment page. You didn't even bother to use proper syntax. By contrast, you will note that your original comment, disagreeable as it may be to the other commentator and to the other friends of Mr. Khosa, has not been downvoted.
- simonebrunozzi 11y agoAnd I upvoted yours for the same reasons :)
- DodgyEggplant 11y agoMaybe, but more downvotes were for the initial comment
- escape_goat 11y agoYou need to think about it this way: historically, the comment pages of HN have made for very good, diverse, and interesting reading. One learns odd and varied details about historical technological decisions, rocket engine design, et cetera... anything may come up. The commentators on Hacker News include a wide variety of domain experts, mildly historical figures, legions upon legions of extremely experienced programmers, managers, entrepreneurs, and so on. This is what has drawn most of us here. The comments, ideas, and speculations produced by persons such as myself are fine, perhaps, but frankly, they're not nearly as interesting to read. This leads us to one of the most frustrating oddities of the Hacker News website: you can't collapse the comments. If there's a tree structure of comments, every comment will take up at least a good thumb's width of screen space. The consequence of this is that every comment is an imposition on the reader. Every comment needs to be able to account for itself. Posting on Hacker News is a performance, rather than a conversation. We're on stage, whether anyone wants us there or not, and unless we're trying to write words that other people might find valuable, unless we're at least trying, then yes, we will be swiftly downvoted to oblivion by everyone, including people exactly like ourselves. There may be annoyance behind it, but there's scarcely enough thought wasted for malice. One-liners must be very informative or situationally relevant messages. And properly capitalized and punctuated. Or else they should go unwritten.