Comment by johnfn
1 day ago
This is pretty obviously false? I get downvoted quite frequently on HN for posting comments that go against what people typically think. For instance, I find it quite difficult to discuss the productivity gains of AI because any comment I make saying that AI makes me more productive immediately gets downvotes. I am not making inflammatory comments - my comments with a similar tone about other things that boost my productivity, like Rust or whatever, never get downvoted.
It's genuinely pathetic to care about downvotes. People downvote me all the time and you don't hear me crying about it. People disagreeing with you is simply the price you pay when you decide to have hot takes, and don't say you didn't understand this up front.
I'm here to have interesting conversations. Downvotes naturally inhibit that by pushing my comment out of sight. There is nothing "pathetic" about that.
You'd have to be f'n dumb to think anybody cares about votes, if it was just votes. No it fucking hides the comment and prevents you from replying for a while.
And it's so one sided: If just the first 3-5 people who see your comment downvote it, it can prevent hundreds or thousands from seeing it. Way too easy to bury the truth and sometimes used that way.
And look: I downvoted you but you can't downvote me, because I replied to your comment. How dumb did they want this system to be?
Also, timing matters: Sometimes if I post a ""hOt TaKe"" and it gets downvoted immediately, if I delete it and repost the same shit, right away or at a later time, sometimes it gets upvoted on the 2nd or 3rd time try: Proving that only the first few votes really matter. Even a 2020 AI could game this crap.
Working as intended my ass
And I'm not just talking about my own comments and didn't have a part in this post's conversation, I see this shit happening to others all the time and point it out to dang whenever he talks like HN is some posh upscale establishment above the shenanigans of the rest of the net.
Going gray gets more eyeballs on your comment than if you were to stay at 1, people will actually stop and read whatever it was that's so controversial. You really are caring far too much.
How does that make it “obviously false”? The community doesn’t want to hear about how AI isn’t working for people on every AI article. That’s the current balance of votes in the community.
> The community doesn’t want to hear about how AI isn’t working for people on every AI article.
The community doesn't want to hear about how AI is the panacea for the problems some people have on every AI article, either.
Don’t read AI articles. The vote balances are a reflection of the current majority opinions. That’s how these voting based social site work, by design.