- comments that have a high excitement to information ratio, such as brief comments that include profanity or attitude, and of course garbage one-liner humor comments. But not good one-line comments (such as the best comeback of all time), and usually not the kind that are nested two or more levels deep in the tree.
- most comments made in reply to an article that definitely should be flagged.
- comments that deliberately ignore standard English in a bad direction. For example, those with sentences that end with the word "lol". On the other hand, saying that you "... vote (up|down) to manipulate ..." is ignoring standard English in a non-bad direction.
- comments that show an inability to appreciate rational discussion or approach things with a sufficient level of detachment. This often results a chain of replies between persons A and B, with person B getting several downvotes (by people voting for similar reasons) on every post and person A getting upvotes. Sometimes both A and B both get downvoted. I think that when people complain about being downvoted, usually it's because they were downvoted for this reason and begin to feel persecuted.
- certain types of self-indulgent comments. I suppose everybody writes comments because they want to share their opinion, but some are indulging the poster's desire to tell others about his worldview without being written in a way that could influence other people's worldviews. There were a lot of these, if you want examples, in the justin.tv suicide thread.
- comments that blandly recite a reader's opinion or reaction about an article, that don't add information, especially when there's a long tail of them and they're all the same. These are the less exciting kind of self-indulgent comments.
Basically, with that formula, I vote with the intent of making this site boring and unwelcoming with a high signal:noise ratio.
I upvoted you for the rather ironic screenshot. As for the best way to get upvoted: "Agree with the rest of the crowd." HN is a very "Go with the flow" crowd. In my observation it doesn't usually pay to have a difference of opinion, which is slightly ironic since this site is aimed at hackers, who, you would hope, should have unique viewpoints.
Every community has a set of shared assumptions and a particular viewpoint, this is pretty much axiomatic given the definition of the term. Most forum systems on the net are unable to deliver much nuance in terms of expressing this viewpoint, so it is easy to perceive "groupthink" when the bulk of the community disagrees with you. Where things get interesting/contentious is when people who share community view A assume everyone else agrees with B and get indignant or defensive when they discover that this view is not shared. There is nothing about "hackers" or startups or other standard topics of this community that necessitates a unique viewpoint, so why assume the rest of the community is going to tolerate large divergence from a standardized norm? Too much input from "unique" viewpoints usually leads to chaos, and that seems to be one thing of which the community has a low tolerance.
I didn't bother with that topic, but your comment seemed like a valid, even if tongue-in-cheek, proposal to me. Apparently 9 other people also had that reaction.
- comments that have a high excitement to information ratio, such as brief comments that include profanity or attitude, and of course garbage one-liner humor comments. But not good one-line comments (such as the best comeback of all time), and usually not the kind that are nested two or more levels deep in the tree.
- most comments made in reply to an article that definitely should be flagged.
- comments that deliberately ignore standard English in a bad direction. For example, those with sentences that end with the word "lol". On the other hand, saying that you "... vote (up|down) to manipulate ..." is ignoring standard English in a non-bad direction.
- comments that show an inability to appreciate rational discussion or approach things with a sufficient level of detachment. This often results a chain of replies between persons A and B, with person B getting several downvotes (by people voting for similar reasons) on every post and person A getting upvotes. Sometimes both A and B both get downvoted. I think that when people complain about being downvoted, usually it's because they were downvoted for this reason and begin to feel persecuted.
- certain types of self-indulgent comments. I suppose everybody writes comments because they want to share their opinion, but some are indulging the poster's desire to tell others about his worldview without being written in a way that could influence other people's worldviews. There were a lot of these, if you want examples, in the justin.tv suicide thread.
- comments that blandly recite a reader's opinion or reaction about an article, that don't add information, especially when there's a long tail of them and they're all the same. These are the less exciting kind of self-indulgent comments.
Basically, with that formula, I vote with the intent of making this site boring and unwelcoming with a high signal:noise ratio.