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Comment by chris_wot | Hacker News Reader

Here's an example of making a genuine mistake and asking an innocent question... and then getting slammed for it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4654361

I made the error of not knowing much about space shuttles and got my timeline most definitely wrong. For my error, I am currently sitting at -1. Not because I was nasty, but because I was wrong and asked a question. I even prefaced the question with "unless I'm much mistaken"!

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You made a wrong factual assertion 2 posts above that one, and when someone corrected you by mentioning the Apollo missions, you didn't take the few minutes on Google/Wikipedia/whatever to learn about the subject, but instead repeated your mistake. It's appropriate for a comment of that sort to be at 0 or -1 karma; it's not like you got slammed to -17 and silently banned for egregious wrongitude. Think of the downvotes as encouraging different behavior: if someone gently corrects you, take the time to look up the information they mentioned.

(For the record, I did not downvote either of those posts, and I've upvoted some of your comments in the past.)

Downmods on HN are supposed to be fine to be used as an indicator of disagreement. It's blindingly daft, but that's the official position.

Even if the official position was against using downmods to show disagreement, it'd not be enforceable. As soon as a large enough group starts using the "disagree" button, almost everyone would follow the trend.

Penalties for disagreeing?

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