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Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

I stopped participating because I found that I usually was insulted somehow or my answer was not credited.

If they can find any fault in a question or answer they will take the opportunity to do so.

If you give a correct answer but don't include a significant amount of explanation, it will be marked down.

Often times I see perfectly valid questions and people refuse to answer them but will only respond with a comment.

I just wanted to try to help some people. I don't have time to write Wiki articles or deal with assholes who have nothing better to do than to do than try to find fault with a question or answer.

Also, a lot of the time the answer is to use some library or module and you can get attacked for even acknowledging that modules exist.

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As someone who has sometimes left a comment instead of an answer, it's because I too am scared that if I try to answer with an actual answer it'll just get downvoted / moderated away, so rather than "risk" a lot of karma in leaving an actual answer, I'll answer in the comments because it's less likely to recieve negative attention.

It's sadly working around the negativity and toxicity of the site and the people who tend to vote / moderate there.

The correct answer is ALWAYS in a comment to the (often marked) wrong answer with the most upvotes.

You get 10 reputation for each upvote but only lose 2 for each downvote your answer gets. And if it gets "moderated away", you don't lose any reputation.

> If they can find any fault in a question or answer they will take the opportunity to do so.

This has been my experience with learn language subreddits as well. I will give a one or two-sentence answer. Someone else will expound on that in the replies. If the reply was written in a snarky way, I get downvoted. That's just an invitation to not participate imo.

I quit because my questions just weren’t getting any answers anymore. As much as they love to complain about people asking questions that could be solved with a google search, they’ve failed me pretty hard when google has already failed me as well.

There are other SE sites I still like though. I tend to have an interesting time on the retrocomputing SE site, for example.

>If they can find any fault in a question or answer they will take the opportunity to do so.

Same on HN. I assume programmers get hyper pedantic because they spend their time telling a computer exactly what to do... Although I was pedantic anyway, so maybe cause and effect are the reverse.

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