[pickingdinner]

Downvoted without a counter argument. Which just proves my point. There is nothing more unintellectual than a plain downvote. I even had some guardrails in that comment too. But I am sure the downvote was warranted to the person who did it.

But also upvotes are similar. No one necessarily "likes" the truth. Nothing about correctness really warrants whatever an upvote means to that person. A "correct" vote maybe, but those are unavailable on these platforms. Not designed for intellectual discourse.

Just to be fair, Twitter is worse. How can you have intellectual discourse with character limits and contextless-ness as a feature? You get something, and something valuable to many, surely, but it isn't intellectual discourse.

Youtube comments are another great case study. Reddit also.

[rezonant]

I often find that checking comment karma too frequently can come with an emotional rollercoaster. You post a take you think folks will find interesting or resonate with, and then the next time you look at it it's gone from 1 to 0.

But it's important to remember that it's a balance that you can't see. If your comment has a 1, that could have been 10 downvotes and 10 upvotes in the time since you posted the comment. And if you wait awhile, more often than not it will go back up. I've had comments hit a -2 and then end up being a 5, or even more. It's all organic.

It's best not to overreact because you happened to look when the balance was a little more negative than positive, and it's useful to consider the possibility that there are 9 upvotes and 10 downvotes to make your comment sit at a zero.

I empathize with what you are saying in the parent post about being cautious not to create a firestorm of people who are offended by your post. But this is really only an issue early on when your karma is low, and that's when it feels the most negative. Sometimes I post things that folks don't like, getting a -1 or a -2 or even -3- but ultimately the impact of that comment to your karma is capped. I don't think it's possible to, say, get a -57 (your current karma) and zero out your account.

EDIT: Oh, according to HN Undocumented, it actually does reduce your user karma even if the comment itself can't go past -4 [https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented?tab=re...]. But it is important to remember that by that point the comment is dead and only users with showdead turned on can even see it anymore. And of course flamewar protection can disable the downvote button (at least the convenient one) when it is triggered, and as a story itself ages downvoting and even upvoting gets automatically turned off.

After you've been posting for a long time and your karma grows into the thousands, having a post be unpopular is basically a non-issue. Obviously you should still adhere to the guidelines and not get yourself removed due to misbehavior, but you just don't have to worry about it much.

Still, this community works best when we take HN's guidelines to heart. Everyone wants to be treated with kindness and the benefit of the doubt, and trying to build that into your own posts helps maintain that community.

[pickingdinner]

I have had previous accounts. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=unabst

So now my parent comment is +5 and the comment you responded to is 0. Of course, though shall not mention downvotes is one of the cardinal rules of this club, so warranted again I am sure. Guilty as charged.

I appreciate the empathy. If more people would just lay out their counterarguments and objections, that would be discourse. But so long as downvotes are used the way they are, any discomforting or nonconforming facts will continue to simply be downvoted, which is no environment for challenging existing ideas. An environment for whatever these environments are.

And as long as any system relies on dictatorship and censorship, as all of these systems do, there will never be true intellectual discourse.

Yes, there needs to be a way to encourage responsible behavior. But that is not done through censorship. Not even through democracy really... as modern politics shows.

Then what would? Not a topic of discourse here. Sadly.

[fractallyte]

Downvotes as punishment for writing reasoned comments and arguments which are true to one's own sensibilities, are an indication that a point of view is "special".

One can start to feel a certain pride in that. (Of course, that shouldn't become the purpose of commenting.)