HN users will definitely downvote challenges to their deeply-held convictions, but so will any other community, and almost always more vigorously. I say this as the proud recipient of many such downvotes. :)
This was done to me, such that if I post too quickly, I am banned from posting except for twice every two hours for a while. This, I believe, will stick with my account for as long as I have it - because I apparently post too fast, engage with too many people etc.
One gets the message: "You are posting too fast. Please slow down." Mother and father dang and sctb have told me off. I must therefore go to bed early.
I think it's also a fabulous bit of trickery pulled here - there aren't "rules" for HN, there are "guidelines"; this leads you to believe it is laid back, and being guidelines, they are not enforced. How wrongly one is misled! They are rules in evey sense of the word, as rules are differed from guidelines only in their enforcement. I know many places which say they have rules and enforce them less than HN enforces its "guidelines".
Slavoj Zizek made a point here I think is relevant - when the father tells his son "Visit your grandmother, for if you don't then I will punish you", the son is much more likely to rebel, to complain - he reacts against authority. But another father may say "Please see your grandmother, she is very sick and old, she misses you" -- the circumstance is the same, but the mode of violence used is different, and agruably much more powerful. Few sons can resist this kind of force.
[0] https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/master/news.arc#L15...
I know that the majority of HN visitors actually are not like that, but if you spend some time considering your point of view, write it down in coherent and mostly grammatically correct English, just for some lazy fucker to come along and click "down" it is they who contribute to the low signal to noise ratio and devalue the HN experience, not you, and that is the feeling you are left with - the visible results to your efforts.
I like how some other sites do this - no downvotes, only a "spam" flag, or a significant cost to downvotes (several karma points or something).
I have been here long enough to know that this will be grey before the database is backed up, and nothing will really change, so I fully applaud "Quiet Hackernews". I personally use an RSS feed. Just came here to check the submission would be flagged (it was - you are sure predictable, if nothing else, HN)
Email the mods and ask them to turn it off.
I don't know how they make that decision. I guess if they've had to give someone many warnings about flamewar behaviour they may not want to turn it off. But I'm not a mod and I don't know how it works.
