I have been reading Hacker News for some years now. More recently I joined and have been attempting to respond to posts with accurate information. If people object to what I have to say I clarify and also go back and edit my posts to remove things if people seem to be particularly offended or annoyed by what I have to say.<p>A recent trend that has occurred is that my posts are downvoted if they criticize what other people have to say, regardless of whether or not my statements are accurate or not.<p>Could the community please clarify to me exactly what votes in the system are supposed to mean? That is, is it a personal opinion of whether you like someones post or not, or should it be more professional? I personally believe that it should be a professional analysis of the post content combined with a small amount of downvotes to try to steer angry individuals into being more cooperative.<p>If it is just a personal opinion, please say exactly this so I can know to become a sheep to save my rating.
There are no qualifications for either upvotes or downvotes, as far as I'm aware. Pg has said that any reason up to and including mere disagreement is valid[0], and this seems to have been accepted in general, although many people here also disagree with it in practice[1].<p>There's really nothing to do but accept it. Asking for clarifications about downvotes, or complaining about them, will only lead to more of the same, and the staff finds meta discussions about site policy to be tedious and tends to kill them.<p>On the other hand, karma is practically useless so I wouldn't worry too much about losing it.<p>[0]<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171</a><p>[1]<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3760275" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3760275</a>
A good friend of mine once said: If you have to criticize something, start by saying something positive. Then say what you want to say, without hurting someone.<p>I don't know what you are commenting on, but I could imagine you're getting down-voted because things you say are basically right, but maybe hurting peoples feelings about what they programmed/created/crafted in hours and days and maybe even weeks or months of their lives.<p>my 2cents.