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Comment by jmount | Hacker News Reader

Already downvoted below zero (about 2 seconds). I'll stand by what I said/implied: it is hard to co-exist with Google systems (and apparently also with pro-Google shills/apologists). I know this post violates HN standards, but I didn't think the parent did.

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I think its just that everyone who doesn't run a mail server hasn't had to deal with this shit so finds it hard to believe that their precious email providers are being a pain in the butt.

That is until you get a court summons after an invoice was sent several times and never got there because some fuckwit mail policy just blackholed it. This stuff does happen and when it does its costly.

YES. This has been killing me for months- my clients keep crawling in my asshole and all of my efforts have changed exactly none of the problem.

It's easy to see how transactional email providers have made money these days. You pay them for 70% of the brain damage, then take on the other 30% for your own.

I think there needs to be a more substantial karma gate to downvoting (10 000+), I'd be fine with falling out of that category myself. I've only been interacting on HN for the past year or so, but lurked for several years prior: the community has been becoming a lot more "redditish."

I nearly always agree or can be convinced by the higher karma users, but the fresh users seem to be defaulting to reddit-level arguments (uneducated, immutable beliefs, hyperbole, taking things personally, no objectivity). I.e.

> just that everyone who doesn't run a mail server hasn't had to deal with this shit

"Everyone" in that sentence should not have the right to be downvoting in the first place.

For the record, I downvoted you for bringing up the "HN is becoming Reddit" meme, which is something I've seen popping up here all too often for the last 4.6 years I'm participating in HN community (and from what I heard, it happened long before then too) - and yet for all those years of "becoming Reddit" HN still did not become it.

Also, Reddit is cool, and there's ton of quality discussions - usually under particular subreddits. For example, I love /r/KerbalSpaceProgram for a perfect combination of being large, friendly, fun, and full of people willing to teach each other some more advanced science.

To address your point: I think current downvote gate is fine and adjusting it up won't really help much. What would help (though I don't know how to achieve that) is people realizing that when saying anything controversial, you might end up getting a bunch of downvotes immediately, but the score usually settles to a reasonable value within an hour or two. It takes time, but one just has to get used to it.

TL;DR: karma comes and goes; look at it through a low-pass filter, to filter small variations.

> look at it through a low-pass filter, to filter small variations

Huh. Maybe we should take that metaphor literally and implement it!

Roughly related to their XMPP implementation too. Really broken, and hard to co-exist with. To make things worse, they have Hangouts too now.

I've found that this community is beyond unwelcoming, bordering on toxic. I no longer see the merit in contributing, and furthermore I find that reading these comment threads has become less and less valuable.

Then I suggest you take a break yes.

I find hn a really to be a really good combination of intelligent, grown up discussion with little name-calling etc.

That said, I think on hn one must be prepared to be corrected, -that's just part of being scientifically minded. As the old saying goes: "Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another."

Yeah that's the consensus, and that's what it was meant to be, that's what it once was. However these days, especially in a community where only certain individuals can downvote, they become the only ones to control the discussion. What was supposed to encourage a higher level of discussion has instead created a community that is the exact opposite.

Who cares about my stupid comments, sure, I'm an idiot- I'll agree to that. Unfortunately, I see it happen all the time. The parent of this, for example, was downvoted immediately.

Everyone in this community is prepared to be corrected- the problem is when there's no correction offered. It's a community of suppression, and it's not hard to see.

There is plenty of disagreement among people who can downvote. And everyone can upvote so bad downvotes should be corrected rapidly by the rest of the community.

Perhaps HN users need to be reminded to upvote things that have been unfairly downvoted? (Although I've seen plenty of examples of corrective upvotes supplied pretty quickly).

I agree that there is too many incorrect downvotes given.

I don't think it is a big problem though only that it has been slightly increasing.

(one comment you'd see back in the days when comment scores where displayed was: "sorry for the downvote, -reading hn from a mobile device ". You don't see this comment anymore but I'm not sure if that is because it was easier to detect accidental downvotes back then or because people where more polite.)

Personally speaking I downvoted your comment because I often downvote things that smack of conspiracy thinking - never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.

Another issue I have with your argument - I don't believe Gmail has the market share to make such a fiendish strategy viable.

I said it could be an accident in the original post.

And try doing business with small businesses and then tell me what market share you perceive GMail as having.

You did say that, but it felt like a disclaimer rather than something you genuinely considered to be a possibility.

I think, right or wrong, you'd probably get a better result if the rage in your text was clearly directed at the consequences rather than the motives - if nothing else because, as you say, the motives don't actually change the consequences and it's the consequences you, I, and everybody else who likes having their own email setup has to suffer.

(to be clear, I'm not commenting on whether or not you should have been downvoted, only on my best guess as to how to get across the same information without it happening)

So andybak, congratulations on clinging to a sweet sounding one-liner, but let's think a little more about it. So anytime something bad happens to a person (their wallet or phone is stolen, or their family dog is killed), and the victim believes the perpetrator acted maliciously, would you tell them that "smacks of conspiracy thinking" (whatever that means to you)?

Another educational moment for you would be to look up the word "conspiracy" to learn what it means. I understand that you were hoping to use it as a dismissive term, but you would have been better off using a universally dismissive term like "crazy", as there are a lot of rational people that understand the factual meaning of "conspiracy" and don't interpret it in the same way you do.

Weird. My comment must have been in close enough proximity to andybak's comment that "they" must have downvoted me when they meant to downvote him.

No, marco, you're just being "corrected." Iron sharpens iron, duh.

Although I'm not certain what you're implying by "corrected", I hadn't ever heard that phrase about iron before. Thanks, I like it.

You and I had similar difficulty yesterday vis-a-vis arbitrary downvoting. I was referring to a comment made at me regarding how HN comments are for correcting people who are wrong, and accompanying that is downvotes. Except for when "correction" has nothing to do with the downvote, or none is offered.

It doesn't matter. The conversation at HN is toxic. I've bitched enough. I was just reaching out for commiseration.

I actually used the term "conspiracy thinking" and I would regard this as a noun phrase with a meaning distinct from "conspiracy".

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