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Comment by ausjke | Hacker News Reader

There are quite some people at HN just enjoy downvoting in my opinion. Any critic thoughts, any neutral comments, any doubtful questions, or some grammar mistakes and mis-spells will all be downvoted by them easily! You have to be very insightful, positive, politically correct etc to avoid that fate. For me even though I know I'm going to be downvoted I will still say what I want to say, including this very comment here.

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I didn't (and can't, because you replied to me) downvote, but since the downvoters are not sharing their reason, I guess I'll share my thoughts on it: I think the "quite some people at HN just enjoy downvoting" is potentially offensive as well as an overgeneralization, and they probably don't like either or both.

Aaaand downvotes for this as well, so I guess that means this is not it?

It's because discussing downvotes is against the HN Guidelines[1]:

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Folks downvote comments about downvoting because it's boring to read, and to discourage others from doing it.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Well, you're now discussing about "downvoting" and by that logic, you are now breaking the HN Guidelines.

Note that your original comment is not downvoted anymore. That's the best reason not to complain about downvotes; usually it will be reversed soon enough if the comment has merit.

Early downvotes can happen through accident or randomness; all it takes is one or two people to misread your comment, or mistakenly tap the down arrow. Or they might have a valid reason for disagreeing and are in the process of writing a comment putting a different point of view.

But getting offended and defensive and editing your comment to complain about it only makes the original comment worse, and leads to an off-topic subthread like this.

Sure, edit the comment if you need to, but try to make it clearer and more informative; that's what I do if I get an early downvote and realise the comment could have been better-worded.

The down votes were because you clearly didn't understand what preemption(or that this is really about it being a realtime flag) is or add much to the conversation(mentioning anything at all that might add something, like even a bad question, "I heard people using raspberry pis for embedded, would this help?"). The downvotes on the other guy are because asking for feedback on downvotes is discouraged.

To contribute, the PREEMPT_RT has been around as a set of patches(if not this specific one, then at least some version of making linux a realtime os.). If you need to know that something will run within a specified amount of time realtime matters.

EDIT: Don't use this and think it will help performance, generally it kills throughput.

You don't talk about fight club here. I don't know who was the smartass that decided that but here we are. Stupid rule but it's their place.

And adding "offensive" every other sentence [1] assumes (for me at least - for others not that much) that you are talking about us as crybabies being easily offended. I almost downvoted for positioning yourself as a purveyor of ethics with the implied assumption that everybody will agree with you.

But in general people around here indeed _are_ easily offended - see for example 'rzv' in this thread being downvoted for talking about this very problem. Depends of course on the thread and on the self-selected audience.

So - what can you learn from a downvote? For me is: don't debate here - HN it's not a platform suitable for debating ideas.

[1] not by _you_ - but in general

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