Once an open platform becomes crowded enough, downvoting without further interaction to show disagreement is fully expected. It's unhealthy because it turns discourse into a popularity contest, but that's the world we live in.
Maybe your opinion is just a tad less popular than what you expect it to be.
> Maybe your opinion is just a tad less popular than what you expect it to be.
Perhaps you didn't read all of my comment. I said I end up with 10-20 upvotes. I also mentioned that these are opinions that HN as a whole finds popular.
It's the discrepancy between the initial voting within the first few minutes and the later voting that is strange. And it's always an initial 2-3 immediate downvotes, followed by dozens of upvotes.
That said, any discussion of downvotes or upvotes on HN will draw downvotes. That's a given.
> It's the discrepancy between the initial voting within the first few minutes and the later voting that is strange. And it's always an initial 2-3 immediate downvotes, followed by dozens of upvotes.
There's no need to invoke a "cabal" theory because it's not odd, it's a natural and expected artefact of the system dynamics.
First you get downvoted because someone didn't like your comment. Or even by accident, mis-clicking the wrong arrow.
Probably something about your comment is seen as downvote-worthy by some people but not most.
After some time, your comment is seen greyed out because of the downvote(s); just 1 downvote is enough for this.
But your comment isn't that bad, there are mixed reactions. So people seeing it greyed out think "that doesn't deserve a downvote" and give it a compensatory upvote to remove the grey.
Those upvoters don't see the effect of each other's upvotes for a while because of the time between loading a page of comments and reading it, so multiple compensatory upvotes take place even though just 1-2 would be enough. And they can't react to the grey as early as the downvote(s) for the same reason.
The viewing figures go through an exponential rise phase, and if your first downvote(s) and subsequent trickle of downvote(s), and compensate-for-grey-because-it-wasn't-that-bad upvote(s) all fall on the exponential rise, you see the effect you've described: A small number of downvotes early followed by a lot more upvotes after a time delay.
If your comment elicits enough mixed responses from different people, it will still get a trickle of downvotes while the viewing figures are high. But you can't see downvotes easily while there are a burst of upvotes. So in this case, you see a small number of initial downvote(s), a larger number of upvotes, followed by a small number of downvotes again as the compensatory-upvote burst comes to an end.
> Also, I've said a bunch of very non-PC things here and they don't always get downvotes.
Again, these comments end up with a large number of upvotes. HN as a whole is pretty good about that.
It's the initial downvoting that is confusing to me. Why is the voting in the first ~5 minutes so different from later voting on these types of comments?
