I have had this happen numerous times, and the rapidity of the downvotes really makes me think it's an automated system -- that now that slowbans and hellbans are pretty widely known and rightly reviled, the mods just flag you and periodically you get a rapid downvote barrage. I guess it is supposed to make me feel insecure about my opinion or something.
I've been much happier with lobste.rs' voting system than HN's. On Lobsters:
1. All moderation is public information.
2. Who invited who is public information.
3. You need to pick a reason for downvoting something.
4. You can undo a downvote or an upvote.
Perhaps because of these properties (or something else), I also enjoy the conversations and community there better.
Frankly, I am annoyed that I can't read what your post said without copy/pasting it into a text document. WTH HN? Don't treat us like children.
It's obvious his post was downvoted for no good reason (as many posts on HN are). By making them difficult to read you're just making it difficult for others to evaluate even what reason it might have been downvoted for was.
(P.S. If you want a Lobsters invite, see my profile.)
Yeah it's fking annoying having the comments go to light gray, ESPECIALLY when downvotes are commonly used as a sign of disagreement rather than "this comment is a troll / abusive". I don't understand the rationale for this at all - just make the title of the comment red or something. I'm an adult and mature enough to actually want to read things I might disagree with.
This just dropped by -4 in a ten second span (edit: moments after another -4), essentially confirming the suspicion.
Do the moderators of HN have any comprehension of how completely incompetent they are at what they're doing? HN today is the perfect example of a profoundly squandered opportunity, and it literally gets worse by the day. It has gone from must-visit to "meh...everything else is exhausted".
But I get a little bit of delight imagining these -- and I apologize, but it is the only word that fits -- hacks conjecturing up some philosophy that makes them productive and useful, instead of destructive and futile.
> This just dropped by -4 in a ten second span (edit: moments after another -4), essentially confirming the suspicion.
If I made a comment along the lines of "I think the HN moderators hire hitmen to kill commenters they don't like," that would probably get downvoted very quickly and very harshly. This would not be proof that the moderators put hits on commenters — it just shows that baseless conspiracy theories are not very popular here.
Indeed, that is one boorish tactic of making a banal, sycophantic comment. The use of a garbage strawman really put it into a higher echelon.
However I stick by my observation. The brain trust behind HN moderation, having moved on from their asinine slowbans and hellbans, have gone to something that they think is trickier. Only it's, again, hilariously naive.
