
Too easy to get down-voted in comments - paulpauper
A problem with commenting on this site is that it is too easy to get down-voted if people disagree or you are wrong. The assumption is, the up-votes from agreement will cancel out the down-votes from disagreement, but there is still negative Brownian drift. The reason is, people are psychologically more inclined to act on things they oppose than agree with. Someone who gets a bad product on Amazon is more likely to leave a negative review than leave a positive review if they are satisfied. There are so many times where people may want to comment on something but fear getting a barrage of down-votes. One solution  I have thought of to counteract the negative drift to to only assign a 1&#x2F;2 - 3&#x2F;4 point karma deduction from down-votes.
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uberman
It is absolutely the case that I have chosen to not offer a comment for fear
of protecting my precious internet points.

I'm not sure that this the way a healthy discussion should work. I feel that
people with opposing views should be allowed to conduct civil debate without
either side being vote-bombed for wrong-think.

It seems really odd that one could lose privileges to participate in this
forum for having posted a civil yet unpopular (with some faction) comment.
Particularly when the same comment offered as a new post would (could?) not
result in the same punishment. Unless of course posts can also be downvoted
and I just lack the rep to see that option.

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shadowgovt
Does it help to remember the points are made up and have no value?

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uberman
I realize that the points are rather arbitrary, but they can have value
particularly for newer users and user who may not have contributed much.

For example, the ability to downvote happens at around 500-ish rep, so users
in that point range might potentially see their privileges come and go based
on comment down and up votes. While users with more than 4k rep like yourself
might never see a change in permissions.

In the end, I accept the rules and workings of this site and gladly
participate.

Without focusing on point hoarding (as you say that becomes arbitrary and
ultimately meaningless), I think that potentially removing someones privileges
with respect to this site should they fall in a critical point range and
comment something about OSS that a vocal group on this site disagrees with
seems wrong to me.

I think Hacker News participation and the community should be able to have a
healthy debate/exchange on tech issues without needing to worry about "points"
in any capacity.

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tannerbrockwell
hn has one of the highest Signal to Noise ratios on the internet. The fact
that we have to put up with occasional dings on downvotes, is made up by the
great good of reduced time spent on the site wading through bad information,
and trolling comments. The fact that the whole thing is run without ads is the
really amazing factor here.

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shadowgovt
As a community, it's susceptible to community effects.

You can say what you want (within community standards), but that doesn't mean
you can say what you want without reaction from the community.

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Fjolsvith
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22794857](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22794857)

