- "Downvoted you because I found your comment rude to OP."
- "How is calling them a cheese-hole-lover rude?! They said they love Swiss cheese and the more Swiss cheese you have, the more cheese holes you have, so they obviously love cheese holes!!"
Edit: I guess the topic is downvotes, sure, but I feel like your comment would be better made somewhere further up the comment chain where it's actually relevant.
I think your downvotes mainly come on some of your political comments. Political threads are not great to begin with, and I think you're giving yourself some undue credit as to your participation to them. I commonly hear that HN leans liberal and whatnot, and that's probably true, but I wouldn't say that non-liberal (for severe lack of a better term) comments are necessarily dogpiled. I think many non-liberal comments that are downvoted here are done so for being in bad faith, because they may have a point but overextend their argument to other targets. I make it a point to not take sides and be critical of all opinions (of course I don't implement it perfectly), and I think I have been treated more or less fairly. I linked some political threads I participated in to demonstrate non-downvoted non-liberal comments. If some of my opinions are "liberal" and others are "conservative", I'll just say that I try to be fair and reasonable.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36523600
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36653284
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45573777
>I think many non-liberal comments that are downvoted here are done so for being in bad faith, because they may have a point but overextend their argument to other targets.
Liberal comments are often in bad faith. The top/only political posts that get upvoted are entire bad-faith liberal propaganda hit pieces. The liberal commenters find a way to wedge politics into anything remotely political, spewing Trump Derangement Syndrome or climate hysteria narratives. These comments get upvoted. Trying to talk sense into these people gets consistently downvoted unless you're willing to do a lot of waffling and phrase your objection in the most milquetoast way you can think of.
>I commonly hear that HN leans liberal and whatnot, and that's probably true, but I wouldn't say that non-liberal (for severe lack of a better term) comments are necessarily dogpiled.
The audience (that comments, anyway) is mostly a liberal hivemind. There is a lot of dog-piling here. You shouldn't be downvoted for simply disagreeing or presenting a reductio ad absurdum argument but it happens here all the time. It's not as bad as Reddit but still not so good. The rate limit sucks too because you can be spammed by like 5 people and not be able to respond to them quick enough.
I might do better if I pretended to be more on the fence than I am, but I am very opinionated. Some of these comments I respond to are SO stupid that I think shock therapy is the appropriate approach. I try not to be personal. I just point out the absurdity of what they are saying and hope they just snap out of it or say something interesting to prove me wrong.
That's actually pretty consistent with a lot of the other comments I see where the author claims their opinion is being downvoted when they're actually just being a jerk.
> and hope they just snap out of it
Is this something you do a lot? Someone talks down to you online and you go "huh! They're right!" and change your mind?