

Does anyone else get confused about why your comments get downvoted? - tomasien

I can never see a rhyme or reason to why I some of my comments occasionally get flagged and downvoted.<p>For instance, this comment directed at Sam Altman<p>"Sam why is your posterous password protected now?"<p>Just got flagged and a -4. How is that not a legitimate question?<p>I've certainly had a comment or two that was actually negative that may have deserved the downvotes, but for the life of me I can't figure out most of them.
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bira
Because they don't add any value to the discussion in the downvoters' opinion.

I remember your comment (Y Combinator's First Batch: Where Are They Now?
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4341770>) and IMO it wasn't really
related to the subject discussed.

~~~
tomasien
Are you kidding? I was trying to read Sam's Posterous, which is referenced in
the original post! And it was password protected, and he commented in the
thread! Jeez, how is that not relevant?

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1123581321
When I've been downvoted, it's usually because the readership misunderstood
me. For example, in <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3577112>, I made a
joke about a Github employee's bravado in a thread at 37signals. It was
interpreted as my accusing 37signals of ddosing Github even though the Github
employee replied and got the joke. Once I edited the post to strongly
emphasize I wasn't accusing 37signals of hacking, the downvote trend somewhat
reversed itself.

P.S. Those who downvoted my reply to myself were entirely justified. It's
never worth it here to poke fun at downvoters in the middle of a thread about
a different topic, and it's not a comment that adds to discussion no matter
how it is received.

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mrgreenfur
I find the same thing here and on Reddit. Seems like a lot of people just
breeze through it and if they don't love it (or find a cat picture /rimshot)
they downvote. I would love downvote with options as mratzloff suggests and a
little pie chart report as to why.

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mratzloff
I do like the idea of choosing a reason from a short list when you hit the
down vote button. For that matter, I like the idea of doing that for up votes,
too.

~~~
masterzora
Ah, full cycle back to /. :)

Not that that's a bad thing. Its moderation system has always been its strong
point.

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masterzora
If you spend your time worrying about downvotes you're going to have a bad
time. You've given us no context for the comment you're referencing so we
can't really answer your question about that but I can tell you that you will
be much happier if you worry less about imaginary internet points and just
focus on participating with quality content.

~~~
tomasien
My old account got banned from posting because of 3 straight comments that
were downvoted, all of them misunderstood to be negative. So yeah it matters.

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exelib
It's because downvoters are little, ivisible as*oles :)

