At least some readers will vote based on how an argument is made as well as what that argument is.

I somewhat frequently downvote comments I'd otherwise agree with if they violate various of the HN guidelines. The principle goal of HN is not truth, fairness, or justice, however admirable those may be (and I rate those highly myself), but intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation. See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404>.

There are definitely times I feel that HN's guidelines should take a back-seat to truth / fairness / justice, though those are comparatively rare.[1] But I understand why the values are as they are, even if I don't necessarily share in degree dang's apparent belief that HN rides on the bleeding knife's edge of sliding into chaos.[2]

HN contains multitudes. Trust that there are those I disagree with quite strongly. I've found a few things that seem to help:

- Voting and flagging can moderate, in all sense of the word, flagrantly extreme or antagonistic discussion. If you think someone is truly violating HN guidelines, both in terms of how they're saying it as well as their overall site activity, most especially ideological battle,[3] email the mods at hn@ycombinator.com. They really do respond, though they don't always agree, of course.

- It's often more helpful to write a top-level comment which lays out the strongest version of your own argument rather than try to duke it out deep within a thread (where few will see your comments). Remember that yours is always the last comment on a discussion when you submit it ... but so was anyone else's. I've often found that my own attempts to steer conversation back to what I suspect are more productive tracks are at least modestly successful, not just in terms of votes, but often in terms of a productive following discussion whether or not it's in agreement with my own views.

- Rather than write from an aggrieved perspective, or to attack others, it's helpful to write effectively as if you'd already won the argument overwhelmingly. That is, you don't have to cast all HN into a single hive mind, or denigrate your opponents' or their views, but just make your own case. I've had several of my own best-received comments come from this approach.

Finally: making blanket assertions about what HN does or doesn't do is highly fraught if you've not systematically looked at actual behaviours. I've done my own poking at the platform (about a year ago now) looking at front-page activity,[4] and the results were ... surprising.

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Notes:

1. Most recent notable example here, and yes, it's still eating at me: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39023516>

2. I'm not finding a good specific reference to that thought, but in searching for it I did come up with an excellent and long essay by dang which explains his moderation rationale ... which broadly read gives some vaguely corresponding insights: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098>

Notably: [The] non-siloed nature of HN causes a deep misunderstanding. Because of the shock I mentioned—the shock of discovering that your neighbor is an enemy, i.e. someone whose views are hostile when you thought you were surrounded by peers—it can feel like HN is a worse community than the others. When I read what people write about HN on other sites, I frequently encounter narration of this experience. ... This is a misunderstanding because it misses a more important truth. The remarkable thing about HN, when it comes to social issues, is not that ugly and offensive comments appear here, though certainly they do. It's that we're all able to stay in one room without destroying it. ... It's easy to miss because of these conflicts, but the important thing about HN is that it remains a single community—one which somehow has managed to withstand the forces that blow the rest of the internet apart.

The epigram on dang's profile page is also worth reading: <https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang>

3. One of the most frequent of dang's admonitions, with 1,382 results as I write this: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>

4. Less systematic than I'd like, and no comprehensive write-up, but a number of comments scattered across HN and the Fediverse: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...> and <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/tagged/HackerNewsAnalytics>