The underlying point of HN has always been contribution.

Sure, that's a terribly bold assertion for me, a regular nobody, to
make, but it's how I've always seen HN. Since this is the open Internet,
I'm sure there's someone who will tell me that I'm wrong, or down-vote
me because they disagree, but I'm fine with dissent. Dissent and
disagreement are the price of admission when we voice our opinions.

My personal opinion is mostly useless outside of a rare few places where
I happen to have some experience. The important thing I try to remember
is HN is full of people with a great deal more experience than I have in
particular fields. I try to learn from their contributions, so I really
do appreciate their efforts. One of the possible ways they contribute is
by down-voting me or stating their disagreement with me. Either way, I
learn something new, so I still appreciate their efforts.

If pg replied to me and told me that I got it all wrong, and I got
clobbered with a bazillion down-votes, then I'm the person who just
learned something new, albeit the hard way. Everyone else also gets to
learn from my rather public mistakes.

Those funny little up and down vote buttons exist for good reason, but
how to use them has never formally been defined (to my knowledge) by any
of the people running HN/YC. The complete lack of defining usage has
always seemed to be entirely intentional; with every feature of HN, you
are expected and trusted to use it wisely. You are being trusted with
privileges of voting, flagging, submitting, and commenting. If you abuse
the trust and the privileges, you'll lose them.

All people suffer from the same delusion; we believe our own interests
are interesting to others. When you try to make a contribution of
something interesting and useful, and you miserably "fail" by all
noticeable metrics like points, then once again, you learn something
new. I can honestly say that my interests are rarely interesting to
others. If you don't believe me, go look at the "submissions" link in my
profile to prove the point. Though you can't see the point counts on my
comments, I'll openly admit that my comments fare no better than my
submissions. If take a look, you'll see that I "fail" regularly, but I
keep trying to contribute useful and interesting things.

An important number to look at is the "avg" in the user profile. It is
the average score on comments you make. The default value for each
comment is 1, an "avg" below one means your comments are a hindrance in
the eyes of your fellow HN contributors, and an "avg" above one means
your comments are successfully contributing to discussions. If your
"avg" is about 2, then on average every time you comment, at least one
person appreciated the effort of your contribution, and put in their
effort to up-vote your comment.

Check out the avg for the HN user grellas [1]. Every time he puts in the
effort to type one of his infamously fantastic comments, at least 53+
people appreciated it (and remembered to scroll back up and give him an
up-vote ;-). Even if you disagree with him on something, you can still
appreciate the effort he put into his contribution, and the experience
and expertise behind his opinions...

Yes, you can disagree with someone, and still appreciate their effort
enough to return the favor in kind with your up-vote. Since there are no
rules or guidelines on voting, you're free to use your votes wisely.

I tend to lack useful experience and expertise on most subjects, so all
I have is my generally uninformed opinions. Some people in my position
will sit quietly and learn from others, but other people in my position
will try to become informed enough to ask good questions. A good
question is a contribution. I doubt the good questions get up-voted as
much as the deserve since most of the attention goes to the person who
shows up with a good answer.

I really really try to remember to up-vote the good questions, but I'm
sure I forget more often than not. Just like everybody else, I'm
regularly distracted by the good answers, and after reading the good
answer, the good question always seems less useful. I'd bet there's some
cognitive bias at work in all this, but sadly, I can't name it.

Sometimes good answers are opinions backed by experience and expertise,
but other times good answers are backed by references. I'm just a sucker
for up-voting answers with references, in fact, I scan for them.

Down-votes happen to everyone, so learn what you can divine form the
experience, and let it go. It's just a fact of life that someone on
the Internet will probably disagree vehemently. Also, mistakes happen in
voting, and there's no way to correct your own voting mistakes.

The down-voting feature is a privilege you earn. I've always been
strongly in the "up-vote-the-good-stuff" camp, so something needs to be
fairly egregious for me to down-vote it. For me, vehemently disagreeing
is never enough to warrant a down-vote. There needs to be some aspect of
malice. The same is true and to a higher degree for flags. Just like
everybody else on the planet, I've got a lot of practice being wrong and
uninteresting, so I try to be tolerant with others.

The site moderators do not make the down-voted comments fade, the HN
forum code [3] running on the server does this automatically. The mods
get unfairly blamed for a lot of things they don't actually do, and most
of the misplaced blame is due to users not understanding or studying the
available forum code and docs. HN was originally written as a test of a
new programming language called "arc" [4], but most users are unprepared
to invest the time to learn a new language and understand the forum code
base. I am fluent, well, was fluent, in a few related Lisp dialects, and
I've only put in the time to barely scratch the surface of how the HN
forum code really works. The only person I have to blame for not knowing
all the details is myself.

A primary problem with all discussion forums and user supported link
aggregation sites is the endless competition for both the attention and
effort of others. Most of the HN Guidelines [2] can be written as a
single guideline, "Don't be the jerk begging, baiting, or manipulating
others for their attention and effort."

If you're like me and reliably "fail" at contributing useful and
interesting comments and submissions according to the flawed metric of
points, then you still ought to be happy. You tried to contribute, and
you had the courage to put your own interests out there for others to
judge, but far more importantly, the lack of points also implies the
lack of using attention grabbing engagement tactics, so you just
succeeded at staying out of the endless fray of countless attention
seekers.

If linkbait outrage porn or regurgitation reporting is far more popular
by the metric of up-votes over time, then I'm actually grateful that my
interests are elsewhere. It just means I have a much better chance to
contribute something different, unexpected, and hopefully interesting.

Lastly you get the references, but please realize they are not intended
to support my personal opinions. Those are my own, and right or wrong, I
hope they're useful and interesting for you and everyone else.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=grellas

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[3] https://github.com/HackerNews/HN

[4] http://arclanguage.org