I believe after several decades of observation of communities like this one, that it is a character flaw of some programmers that because they are good at talking to computers—which are in fact totally objective interpreters of code—that the same attribute applies to their person. However at some point we are all emotional and biased creatures, and the distinction between disagreement and illogical argument or even outright factual innacuracy can at times blur significantly.
What I'm saying is that before you form a knee-jerk rationalization about the reason a downvote happened (because of course I do the same thing), stop and consider that there's at least a 50% chance that your argument is not in fact as airtight as your brain's emotional connection to it, and perhaps you are being downvoted for reasons totally unrelated to what you so hastily ascribe to the anonymous voters.
From my point of view, even when someone is on the correct 'side' of an argument, if they got there by mistake it's still important to point that out. Both fortran77 and CoastalCoder can be wrong at the same time.
Is "I think you misread that line" far ruder than I thought it was?
...surely "I doubt my mom knows" wasn't supposed to be a developer anecdote that I misunderstood massively?
I can't speak for everyone, but I downvoted you primarily because of your arrogant and generally uncivil tone and your predictions and assumptions as why people (would) downvote you.
Judging from your other comments, you can be fascinating and insightful, and I have much to learn from you especially in the field of programming. And yet your comment history is peppered with comments in a similar tone and attitude.
I can't tell if you're just tone-deaf or doing this on purpose, but I find it highly unpleasant. Plus, you're not following the guidelines:
> Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
> Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you.
I really wish people would explain why they downvoted me on hackernews. Its not that I really care about the points its that I want to know what I did wrong. Like if I accidentally offended someone or it just wasn't an interesting comment or observation or that it is completely wrong statement.
Your response is excellent anatoly and I appreciate it.
I disagree with your opinion on why folks are worried about this. There are many folks who are scared off unnecessarily by the sheer arrogance of those who say that they shouldn't code.
However, whoever is downvoting opinions that they don't like - will they cut it out? Seriously, I'd love to know who downvotes because I've noticed a lot of it is unjust. If you notice, there are a lot of considered responses to this considered reply. The debate has continued - trying to censor the opinion of others is pretty horrendous IMO.
I actually think Reddit's /r/programming shows that a potential downvote for everyone doesn't do anything to bring about reason. It used to be a vibrant, smart, collaborative community. Now you need the skin of a Rhino to post there.
I didn't downvote him because of his civil comment about misleading comment, but because of his un-hackerish tone about him not planning to learn something that is completely relevant to his career (his description in his page is: I'm a JavaScript and Node nerd). Maybe I shouldn't have done it, but I really have nothing against him. I truly wanted him the best and downvoting his (IMO) wrong comment was an effort to make him understand that what he is doing is wrong.
We are all online friends and friends ought to warn each other when they see their friend is doing something stupid (I really think writing any script longer than 20 lines in JavaScript instead of CoffeeScript is stupid).
That would be fine if any the people down voting were exempt from being misinformed themselves and took the time to explain why they disagreed with the comments they were down voting. But in this case I've been hardening Linux and UNIX servers professionally for years and yet still am completely in the dark about what it was that people disagreed with in my advice.
The down vote itself doesn't really bother me so much as the inability for misinformation to be corrected - be that my own error or whoever (which is why I always make a point of replying to people rather than down voting).
It’s all good. You’re welcome. I can see it both ways: its sucks to get downvoted and not know why. But also, here we are talking about something that’s not C++ modules in a thread about C++ modules.
The surest way to get massively downvoted here is to complain about downvoted, though. People seem to relish in it.
So even in circumstances where the consensus is just inaccurate, and even though that results in rate-limiting you removing your opportunity to engage in a discussion, merely talking about this circumstance simply exacerbates it
You end by saying that downvoting !== hating him or disagreeing with everything he thinks, yet I can't find a worse reason to downvote than the explanation you gave right before: you literally downvoted him because of a personal decision he makes in his life that affects no one else regarding the learning of a programming language, and not at all for any factual inaccuracy in his comment.
He never said anyone else should not learn CoffeeScript nor that CoffeeScript was bad, but that for whatever reason in his own personal life it hasn't become valuable enough to do so. And yet still, the point of his comment had nothing to do with that, and instead simply requests that stories be labeled accurately. Seems completely uncontroversial to me.
Downvotes are useful for quality control, but there is no real difference between -3 and -4.
This and many others comprise examples of precisely how downvotes aren't useful for much of anything.
“How do I do X?”. Often, X is quite a simple thing, like “append to a list”, or “merge two dictionaries”. I find that the longer I program with all sorts of different languages, the more I struggle remembering all that sort of stuff.
You don't know a programming language if you need Stack Overflow to recall trivial things. I'd go as far to state that you're barely a programmer if you must have an Internet connection to program.
I'm of the opinion that Stack Overflow is primarily good for those who don't know and don't want to learn. That is, I've never used it for an APL question or an Ada question and not so for Common Lisp, either; note that these are all real languages, that are standardized, have books written about them, and have real documentation. So, if you want to play with JavaScript, then Stack Overflow seems like a good place, as that's a disgusting and poorly documented language, but real languages don't need this manner of thing.
The author fails to recognize that having a stupid little voting system and stupid Internet points is precisely the cause of the issue. I'm accustomed to anonymous communications and people get along just fine, in part because the only thing you can do to voice disagreement is to write an actual reply instead of clicking a stupid little button and, since you're not vying for stupid Internet points, you only write a response if you actually want to help someone, with no expectation of receiving anything except perhaps a Thank You. out of it.
The Vi & Vim Stack Exchange is much better in my opinion (I am a moderator there, so I may be biased). We actually had one user being a condescending prick for a while, so we kicked him off. The site has been much better ever since.
That's another issue with this garbage. You get cases of Oh, you're not violating any rules, but you're being mean by my own idea and since we have accounts and lasting reputations and I've been observing you, I've decided you're banned just because.; I'm accustomed to the old-fashioned notion of having real rules that are enforced consistently; you can't moderate anonymous messages by any other means.
So, in closing, you're likely only asking a question on Stack Overflow if you don't know what you're doing. Read a book or check the standards, instead. If your language doesn't have a standard or good books, learn a real language. If your standard is a pile of garbage, as the WWW is, then this would actually be a decent use of this tribal knowledge sharing, but the better solution is to avoid the garbage standard to start with.
I could refine this message, but I'm not particularly concerned. Surely I'm not the only one here who thinks similarly.
Re: If I think you’re wrong, I’m going to downvote you and move on
If the receiver of the downvote doesn't know why, they may make the same thinking process mistake again, and moderators will have to reinvent their downvotes in the future. It may not be the same person each time, but in agraggrate thinking errors pile up, so that approach doesn't scale for forums full of mostly repeat commentators.
In my opinion, Hacker News should require a non-trivial comment on the reason why something is downvoted, prompting for sufficient counter-details. Maybe that's dreamy feature-creep, but it sure would feel nicer than hit-and-run downvotes. I prefer to learn from my mistakes.
Anyhow, the specific score changed so it's no longer an issue here, but remains a general frustration. Thanks for your feedback; I appreciate it regardless of whether I agree.
Too bad you're so bitter. I was in full agreement with your original comment, thought it was unfair you were downvoted in the first place. And you're the truly clueless one if you think you can extrapolate the extent of my cleverness from such a small cross section of interaction with my being.
But I'd love to know how my comment made your point?
Reality is altered by downvotes, at the minimum through the color change on our screens as I pointed out, and in the mental reactions that arise when someone on Hacker News sees that greyed text.
There's also the fact that the downvoting is causing you to lash out the way you are, to protect your fragile sense of ego. Is that not downvoting changing reality? At one moment you were not irritated by being downvoted, and the next moment you were. And don't try to weasel yourself out of this by attempting to be aloof regarding downvoting, you've already missed your chance at that.
P.S. For the sake of your well being I recommend you not to reply to this comment.
P.P.S. Lol @ you editing your comment. Looks like I made my point.
> I'm thoroughtly disgusted with the way I've been treated here, especially the number of downvotes I've gotten.
The first sentence of your post that is being downvoted is okay; it contributes something to the conversation:
> A spec is a contract between programmers and in the long run, it's better (for users and programmers) to follow specs and expect others to follow them, rather than to let others break them willy-nilly and just bend over backwards to accomodate.
I believe your second sentence is the reason you're being downvoted:
> Oh, but I guess since this point requires actual thinking to understand, it's not in the realm of reality...
That sentence is sarcastic, insulting to people's intelligence, and contributes nothing to the conversation. If you lose that attitude, I think your contributions would be better received.
Don't worry about the downvotes. Things have gotten pretty bad around here lately, especially after the whole "downvote if you disagree" policy was encouraged.
A lot of totally correct and perfectly valid commentary ends up getting downvoted these days, often with no attempt made to explain why. It's particularly likely to happen when members of the Mozilla, JavaScript or Rust communities are involved. They're particularly sensitive to anything that might contradict their beliefs, and apparently they're particularly eager to downvote, for whatever reason.
These days, many of us have started to read all of the downvoted comments. Aside from occasional spam, they're often among the most insightful comments in any given thread.
What I'm saying is that before you form a knee-jerk rationalization about the reason a downvote happened (because of course I do the same thing), stop and consider that there's at least a 50% chance that your argument is not in fact as airtight as your brain's emotional connection to it, and perhaps you are being downvoted for reasons totally unrelated to what you so hastily ascribe to the anonymous voters.
reply