100% of active participants care about not getting negative karma on comments.
This is good actually, because rude or completely pointless comments are severely downvoted, this being the punishment instrument that the community has for people that break the guidelines.
> 100% of active participants care about not getting negative karma on comments.
Add me to the list of people that really don't give a damn.
It would be interesting to see a list of the 10 most-downvoted comments. (I might have multiple entries.) Some things just need saying: People who will say them and endure such ignominious downvotes might well have a bit more experience than the avg user here. They say them to plant seeds in less-experienced folks, knowing that it may well take years to germinate.
>Add me to the list of people that really don't give a damn.
And me.
There is a lot of value in expressing opinions which go against the grain, even if they are not easily accepted. It's only through honest debate that the truth can be found.
While HN's voting system is superior to that of other social news sites, I still think that the down arrow should have a "report" link instead to make people think twice about down-voting someone's opinion, assuming that the opinion is honest. Upvotes are harmless, assuming that spam is taken care of, and I see no problem with that aspect of the behaviour of such a system.
Personally I would generally care about being downvoted because generally I don't comment anything that I would expect to be downvoted, and therefore if it does it annoys me to know that either I was wrong in my judgement of what I said, or that the downvoter was wrong in how they read it (or that the downvoter is just an asshole - the ultimate conclusion I always come to when wondering why somebody downvoted me!)
But I'd never care about it as more of a signal of how a comment was received... if I felt there was a valid reason for me to reply with a one-word comment to somebody simply saying "Cunt." then knowing that I would be downvoted wouldn't come into it.
So far I don't think I've ever written that comment on HN, but I have written a few that I expected to get quite a few downvotes for - often accurate expectations, occasionally completely wrong. And as long as I know that they're downvoting for the reasons I expected, not that I've said something I wish I hadn't, I'm fine with that.
This is good actually, because rude or completely pointless comments are severely downvoted, this being the punishment instrument that the community has for people that break the guidelines.