> Both are very responsive when contacted at hn@ycombinator.com
True in my experience when I asked for my comment to be deleted.
> Complaining about being downvoted is discouraged and usually results in even more downvotes.
It works sometimes however. My comment [1] was controversial and was moving up and down between negative and +4 votes for the first two hours of its life. After I made the edit complaining about the downvotes, it started rising rapidly and is now resting at +22.
> Hacker News encourages a single discussion on a given story. All others are marked as a [dupe] and will be killed without the ability to vouch.
An addendum is that from my experience, it is unclear which story the mods will consider the dupe, sometimes the earlier posted story will be called the dupe.
> Relatedly, moderators can also invite users via email to resubmit a post which didn't get much traction.
This happened to my "All the goodness gone from tea (1688)" [2] submission. I am amazed that a moderator read a submission that was only +2 in its original form and also had difficult ergonomics because it was on google books.
> One popular "trick" for obfuscating voting manipulation ... This trick doesn't actually work.
So, undetectable vote manipulation hasn't been detected and there fore doesn't exist? I have trouble believing this. This seems more like a call to not even try claiming that it won't work, because it just might work. I wish some charitable soul with gray morals would step up with their story of voter manipulation that wasn't detected. Tooling could be developed to curb its use by other individuals. They can do this privately to the mods.
> It works sometimes however. My comment [1] was controversial and was moving up and down between negative and +4 votes for the first two hours of its life. After I made the edit complaining about the downvotes, it started rising rapidly and is now resting at +22.
Downvotes are also disabled after a period of time. A comment can only go up or maintain its rank once that has happened. This is evident when reading older threads.
That probably doesn’t account for all of the upvotes in your example, of course.
> So, undetectable vote manipulation hasn't been detected and there fore doesn't exist?
I think rather the point was that this particular way of manipulation is detectable and is being detected. That of course doesn't preclude other ways of manipulation which are not.
Tone counts for everything when complaining about downvotes. Asking politely where you think you went wrong often does work. If it's hostile like "wake up sheeple", you're digging your hole deeper.
Indeed. Asking politely for what went wrong or for counter arguments usually helps. But it does not always.
Two points I got downvoted for without much substantial dicussion was when I said that security through obscurity does work (to some degree) and that tinkering with crypto is okay for everybody, and with certain preparation, can even be used in production in some cases. I stand by these points and are open to debate, but for the big majority I just get silently downvoted or arrogantly spoken to as if I didn't knew what I'm talking about.
I think this is a pity because tinkering with stuff is an essential part of being a hacker.
True in my experience when I asked for my comment to be deleted.
> Complaining about being downvoted is discouraged and usually results in even more downvotes.
It works sometimes however. My comment [1] was controversial and was moving up and down between negative and +4 votes for the first two hours of its life. After I made the edit complaining about the downvotes, it started rising rapidly and is now resting at +22.
> Hacker News encourages a single discussion on a given story. All others are marked as a [dupe] and will be killed without the ability to vouch.
An addendum is that from my experience, it is unclear which story the mods will consider the dupe, sometimes the earlier posted story will be called the dupe.
> Relatedly, moderators can also invite users via email to resubmit a post which didn't get much traction.
This happened to my "All the goodness gone from tea (1688)" [2] submission. I am amazed that a moderator read a submission that was only +2 in its original form and also had difficult ergonomics because it was on google books.
> One popular "trick" for obfuscating voting manipulation ... This trick doesn't actually work.
So, undetectable vote manipulation hasn't been detected and there fore doesn't exist? I have trouble believing this. This seems more like a call to not even try claiming that it won't work, because it just might work. I wish some charitable soul with gray morals would step up with their story of voter manipulation that wasn't detected. Tooling could be developed to curb its use by other individuals. They can do this privately to the mods.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15994458
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15324547