Comment by notdarkyet
17 years ago
At this point, my faith in this community is slowly being evaporated. Where I would normally look to this site as quite possibly the most objective source of information (from a entrepreneurial perspective) and a source of honest opinions and as a frequent internet observer (I really do place so much value on all of your comments and to my knowledge, almost all of them have had a significant impact of my life and my decisions), I am scared to what this community has become. As someone who followed digg and reddit from the early days, I transitioned to this site because I valued all of your opinions, which I believed to be honest. All of my submissions (all ask YC/HN) have been to consult the community on decisions that affect my life to an unbelievable extent. I really am just so confused as to what I said that has offended the community to result in such an extreme display of downmodding (including those that disagree with me). Please just explain yourselves and opinions rather than downmod all of the threads opinions.
EDIT: As an indicator, my Karma has dropped roughly 20 points within the past hour or so, I just really would love to know what aspect of what I said that has made all of you to so passionately enforce such an action. Maybe I have not established relevancy to the hacker community as to why this story matters and that is fine (or maybe you all just disagree which is fine with me as well). I cannot reiterate enough, for my sake, please just let me know what I said that was so offensive. Please refute.
EDIT 2:
I just would also like to say that this comment has no relation to the one that has been associated with my comment (the one that has been placed below mine because the one it is associated with has been deleted).
That comment goes as follows: Look, I'm an Obama supporter. It's just that as far as I see it, this sort of thing is better left to other venues.
"this community is slowly being evaporated"
No it's not. Have faith in pg and the rest of us. This stuff happens all the time and we survive just fine. How could you know this after only 28 days.
"my Karma has dropped roughly 20 points within the past hour or so, I just really would love to know"
You never will, so don't waste any mental energy worrying about it. That's just the way it goes.
"confused as to what I said that has offended the community"
You haven't "offended" the community. Some people just downvote without commenting. Once it gets going, sometimes it snowballs. Forget about it and move on.
"All of my submissions (all ask YC/HN) have been to consult the community on decisions that affect my life to an unbelievable extent."
Great! Keep it up and do your part. Forget about the other crap.
I have noticed that discussions about what is "appropriate" get lots of upvotes ot lots of downvotes or both, without much logic. Hacker content threads, OTOH, are our bread and butter and are generally well received and appreciated. Stick with the latter.
FWIW I downmodded all politically partisan comments except the one specifically regarding technology policy. I did this because I like HN, and don't want it to turn into this: http://files.sharenator.com/we_know-2368.png I am sure you are a nice guy, I am downmodding your comments, not you. Don't take it personal.
The best thing to do is to be the HN you want to read. Submit good articles, make intelligent comments, and (possibly most significantly) vote up the articles which are really worthwhile. It still doesn't take a whole lot of votes to get something moving up the front page.