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.
I would guess the nda part. Many people hate the very idea of an nda. But really (down)votes are for saying you agree or disagree without cluttering up the thread with useless comments. So they just didn't agree, they weren't necessarily offended.
Fwiw I upvoted your first comment and down voted the ones talking about votes.
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.
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.
