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Comment by daoboy | Hacker News Reader

This very issue is why I haven't had a social media account in years. Even something as benign as posting here on HN entails editing to avoid downvotes.

While we all make necessary and unavoidable judgements, the explicit nature of being judged and acting as a judge on social media lends itself to being inauthentic and narcissistic.

Hans-Georg Moeller has an excellent YouTube channel called Carefree Wandering. There several very good episodes on authenticity and social media.

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I hit this just recently here. Discussing a simple math problem that happened to be attached to a political point ended up w/ me getting downvoted by a person who I actually agreed with, but they couldn't see past their own nose to understand what I was saying.

Or just accept some downvotes now and again? They'll stop at -4 anyway. I've hit it (and once in awhile I've probably deserved it), and known some nice thoughtful people IRL who also post here and had it happen on comments I thought were perfectly fine. Sometimes you just hit a weird mood in a thread or whatever; it's not worth worrying about unless the moderators tell you to cool it.

The system of likes/dislikes, upvotes/downvotes, etc are a feedback mechanism specifically designed to leverage the fact that we are predisposed by evolution to worry about that exact thing.

So while I accept it to the extent that I still post here, I feel like 'don't worry about it' completely misses the point of 'it'. It exists specifically for you to worry about.

>Even something as benign as posting here on HN entails editing to avoid downvotes.

Just edit to make sure you are clear in your thoughts put into text. Don't censor yourself, karma points are largely meaningless anyway. You don't get to trade them in for an eraser or anything. Speak your mind, that's the main benefit of the platform.

I occasionally post things that I know will be downvoted to remind myself the votes don't matter.

Ironically, when I do want to say something mildly controversial but I want it to be taken seriously, I just add "I know this will be downvoted to hell but..." and then it is not downvoted. Pro tip.

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