Ask HN: What makes you instantly downvote a post?

3 points by ClipNoteBook 138 days ago | 6 comments

I want to understand what triggers the “nope” reaction on HN. Sometimes a post might be interesting, but something about it feels off and people downvote fast.

What makes you instantly downvote a post here? What patterns make you trust a post and upvote it?

If you have examples of good vs bad wording, I would love to learn.

bediger4000 138 days ago |

The usual suspects: spam, advertising, that guy who had an LLM hallucinate a holy book, $X with "AI", but additionally there are certain sites that I automatically flag posts of. I don't auto-downvote political or economic comments unless they're low effort slogan level.

bediger4000 138 days ago | |

I think I should also add that I suspect that voting rings exist for HN. The mod(s) do a decent job of eliminating them, but I think there's pro-MAGA and anti-vaxx voting rings that have slipped through the nets.

gus_massa 138 days ago |

Linking to your site in every single comment will get downvotes. It's not a hard rule, there are a few exceptions, let's say it applies 99% of the times.

Using a sockpuppet/coworker/whatever like https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=puildupO to make questions so you can reply with a link to your site will get downvotes.

puildupO 132 days ago | |

AND ??? how that hurt u ???

soldthat 138 days ago |

- Spam: obvious self-promotion, with no useful content or when irrelevant.

- Personal attacks: going after the person instead of the idea.

- Irrational hyperbole: very strong claims not backed up by logic or evidence.

- Bad faith: deliberate misreading, quote-mining, or straw-manning the OP.

- Hate hijacking: attempts at using this platform as an outlet for political propaganda.

ClipNoteBook 138 days ago |

my tool clipnotebook.com, It lets me save links as visual cards and organize them into playlists, I can share a playlist or the whole notebook with one link.,The best part is there is no login, It generates a private key URL that gives access to your notebook