This is probably one of the reasons they experimented with removing the down-voting on comments. Some people, rather than vote on relevance or insight of the comments feel they should be enforcing their own arbitrary standards.
I think the issue is in looking on down votes as a bad thing :) who cares? You did make a silly comment and people are pointing that out (relevance is fairly subjective; I suspect a number of people read the cancer comment and then stopped reading it as "not relevant")
Sometimes people down vote poorly or for the wrong reasons, I agree. I think this case was justified - but for the cancer comment I myself wouldn't have - indeed I'd probably have upvoted because I do agree. That is how badly it came across (and as you might read elsewhere this is about my 2nd vote today :))
But I have no regrets about the rest. I don't want to see this guy going in the wrong direction, and the suggestion of learning about chip design was just way beyond bad.
But why bother. Hacker news is becoming an echo chamber. I should stick to LISP being my answer to every question.
Comments
This is probably one of the reasons they experimented with removing the down-voting on comments. Some people, rather than vote on relevance or insight of the comments feel they should be enforcing their own arbitrary standards.
I think the issue is in looking on down votes as a bad thing :) who cares? You did make a silly comment and people are pointing that out (relevance is fairly subjective; I suspect a number of people read the cancer comment and then stopped reading it as "not relevant")
Sometimes people down vote poorly or for the wrong reasons, I agree. I think this case was justified - but for the cancer comment I myself wouldn't have - indeed I'd probably have upvoted because I do agree. That is how badly it came across (and as you might read elsewhere this is about my 2nd vote today :))
It was a quote from Futurama.
But I have no regrets about the rest. I don't want to see this guy going in the wrong direction, and the suggestion of learning about chip design was just way beyond bad.
But why bother. Hacker news is becoming an echo chamber. I should stick to LISP being my answer to every question.
I think that allowing mean-spirited posts to be down voted is useful. Sometimes it reminds me I need to be a bit more constructive.