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Comment by breily | Hacker News Reader

I'm sick of submissions about downvotes.

Great, there are no submissions about downvotes there, because unlike here it is not a problem.

Edit: whoever is downvoting this comment should check the definition of "irony"

Unfortunately, you're the victim of some bad timing. Your submission's title makes it seem like yet another complaint about being downvoted, at a time when many of us are tired of seeing these things and will knee-jerkedly downvote the author / upvote sentiments against. The submission text is fairly vague and doesn't clearly dispel the notion that this is yet another complaint thread, rather than an advertisement for a startup.

A better title would have been, "Are you sick of being downvoted for having a different opinion? Try ______." Ideally, this would have been a direct link to your site. At a minimum, the URL for it should have been included in the submission text. Having us click through to your user profile == bad usability!

That said, the blame does not fall squarely on your shoulders. There's some definite mob mentality going on here that is embarrassing for a community supposedly composed of free-thinking hacker-entrepreneurs.

Maybe you were downvoted for being hard to understand? "there"?

English is not my first language.

I meant that on the social news site that I'm working on there are no posts about downvotes, because everybody is free to express their opinion with up and down votes as they wish and it doesn't hurt anybody.

Oh. Maybe you are being downvoted for advertising your startup too much?

Maybe. I'm trying to advertise a solution to the problem. My startup is just one possible implementation of it.

Edit: Another solution would be to ask people to explain when they downvote. Please, what's wrong with THIS comment?

You should probably ignore downvotes until at least -2. It could be just one random idiot and it doesn't mean anything.

His first comment is now -19 and his other two were -3 before I came in here. Why all the pile-on downvoting for no real reason, people? Are those comments really worth -19?

It is called karma bombing and it just proves the point.

Compare it to the solution where there's a recommendation system that helps everybody involved: the ones downvoting the posts will form one cluster, the ones upvoting them will be in another. People that like stories like that will see more, people that do not will be spared from them.

It's a community response to your suggestion that we should leave Hacker News and go to Jaanix because of the evils of downvoting. Downvoting is communication, it's really not a fault of the system if you find it too painful to hear.

My communication skills must be terrible, but I'm not asking anybody to leave. Hacker News is great, but it covers only small subset of all the news out there.

Pointing out what you (and others) see as a problem with this news site, and suggest it as a reason to go to your news site, only makes sense if you don't see them as independent.

Funnily enough, I (and I guess many people here) am only interested in a small subset of "all the news out there". More is less.

About your proposed solution of "clusters": Getting people to explore outside of their comfort zone, and letting them encounter ideas that challenge their faith-based views, is actually a good thing. Insular clusters do sound "safe" but I would not assume that is a net positive.

Maybe it shouldn't be possible to vote anything below -5.

edit: i posted this in feature requests thread

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