edit btw, I forgot to mention that I appreciate you taking the time to read that overly long post.

And in this case, because you bothered to comment I don't feel bad. I feel engaged and I see your point. Not every post I make has a great deal of value, but I'd say that not every post anybody makes here has a great deal of value, even pg. Do they deserve a downvote? Not if the cost is that the poster will not bother in the future, we may loose valuable commentary because of that. And especially if the entire thread becomes contaminated because a downvote patrol has gone and tainted the entire thing, preventing other people from posting because they too might be downvoted.

But this is entirely different than my post a few levels up (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021131), that's now down to -5 at last look, which is topical, in response to somebody else, laments the use of the downvote as a shorthand for "fag" isn't snarky, or rude, isn't spam, isn't overly lengthy, conforms to supposed community standards on being short (as several posters in this topic have brought up) etc.

By merely showing agreement with the repondant, I took I a -5 hit to my karma and absolutely nothing in response as to why a downvote in this case is not shorthand for "fag".

And the main problem is that I can't confront my attackers. Their downvotes are about as anonymous as you can get (anonymity can breed abuse). And the community standards also say that I can't question "why the downvotes?". It's not questioning the votes, it's asking for a reason. So there is absolutely no resolution to this.

From the downvoters perspective, theirs is an perfect crime, they have no repercussions for abusing the system, the victim has no recourse, and no defense, and cannot even ask why, they cannot even metacomment that downvoting appears to be becoming a problem without martyring themselves and getting more downvotes.

If by some happenstance that the victim learns the identity of the attacker because they bothered to post a response, they can't downvote the response and at least see some reciprocity (maybe at higher karma levels than mine you can, but I have no option for example to downvote your reponse). Basically they have absolutely no recourse. They can't even flag somebody who has it out for them and downvotes everything they post because they don't know the identity of their attacker. It's a system perfectly setup for abuse by habitual downvoters as we are now seeing.

It's at these moments that I'm saying to myself "you know what, fuck all of you I'm done here" even though I know it's just a handful of people that run around in a downvote patrol and do that kind of thing.

There's lots of ideas here about how to fix the brokeness of the voting system, here's another, people who habitually downvote, say more than 5 times a month, are no longer able to downvote, and must post at least 20 comments and receive +20 points before they can downvote again. Basically it should be a weapon with consequences.

My gut reaction to this absurdity is to disengage and forget the entire thing. To stop posting, and stop conversing and stop trying to find and contribute to interesting discussion in what is probably one of the better forums I've come across in a great many years. pg hasn't commented on this aspect of the system yet as I'm suspecting he's still observing and watching.