downvotes

Because your first post turned out content-free, so the downvotes want people not to bother reading it.

If someone unfairly downvotes an old comment, no one will notice and correct it.

I see that most of your comments are of the same kind, and that you get lots of downvotes.

Yes, got a couple of early downvotes likely due to the self-referencing answer.

And it's blatantly obvious they don't represent the HN community, given the downvotes.

He's not talking about a few downvotes either, he's talking about the huge numbers of people who get swept up into eg Twitter shitstorms.

The reason for the downvotes is that the Hacker News feels like appreciation is best communicated through upvoting: it helps sorting the comments in order of relevance, and avoid cluttering the thread with +1/-1 comments.

It's not flattering, and provides a good narrative for the downvotes.

If that were what downvotes were currently suppressing, I feel we'd see a lot more illegal humorists slipping through this border control.

Are downvotes really that effective a filter?

For the moment, we do have comment reports/downvotes and moderators.

I agree that downvotes are not conducive to a discussion.

I'm starting to interpret the "don't complain about downvotes" guideline as "don't shed light on how this community misuses downvotes to quietly marginalize contrary views while maintaining the illusion of civil discourse."

At the meta-level, downvoted humor is invariably followed by "why all the downvotes, lighten up" driving any hope of anyone learning anything about anything other than the way HN tends to work further into the weeds with a pitcher of hurt feelings.

For instance, if HN downvotes don't stop the haters ( under even the extreme assumption that, on the internet, there are 10 haters to every 1 netizen ), I don't think they're stopping the X times as many humorists ( or "Humorous Comment Events" ).

Edit: Downvotes, but no arguments, as expected.