zlacker

>>femfos+(OP)
Anyone who is pragmatic and willing to take open and honest advice/criticism from people they respect needs to advertise themselves that way in today’s environment. It is on the entrepreneur to convince the person from whom they are seeking advice that they will not regret giving it. As an alternative, perhaps investors should offer an optional “advice NDA” that would allow them to speak more freely, with less fear of social media scorn.

>>downan+OI
For the (at least) 2 people that downvoted this: what part of this comment is controversial or offends you? I don’t see it, and I would love to understand. Downvoting without comment does no good for anyone.

>>downan+sN
I didn't do this in this situation, but I sometimes downvote by accident in an attempt to collapse. There are a lot of people on this thread so it could have happened.

>>daniel+NO
It’s now at -4 (went from +2 to -2). Which means that there is something in it that offends people, but nobody is willing to say what it is. I am genuinely trying to understand, because there isn’t a single shred of text in that comment that was intended to be offensive to anyone.

>>downan+rP
It’s interesting because there’s also the meta question of why your comments are being downvoted. I think possibly because on HN you’re not supposed to comment specifically about up or down votes, but like you I am also curious.

I wonder if there should be a policy where you can only downvote if you leave a comment on it first. And somewhat relatedly I think the policy should extend to flagged posts.

>>bryan0+tU
A good reason to flag a post is that it seems like trolling. You shouldn’t need to feed the troll to downvote or flag them.

I don’t even think it would be good to require a private explanation when downvoting or flagging. In my experience with other services with user-generated content, negative feedback signals for community driven moderation are very valuable and most users never give them. You want the process to be as streamlined as possible. You can give more weight to feedback from more trusted users, which HN does in a transparent way by gating the flag and downvote options to accounts with more reputation.

To be clear, I think the comment here is a good contribution. There’s a lot of passion about this topic and the system seems to break down somewhat.