Politely surfing from 0 to 501, then back down to 0
It's a challenge to gain downvote privileges on Hacker News, then get downvoted back to zero without breaking any of the guidelines about commenting posted here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Because karma points are an arbitrary, ambiguous, opaque and inarticulate form of moderation. Plus, there is no explicit rule that the purpose of commenting is to gain them. So as long as I don't break the rules it should be allowed to set my goal to go from 560 (or whatever I have) down to zero instead of the other way around.
I haven't tried yet. But my hypothesis to achieve my goal within the bounds of the guidelines is the following:
- Refrain from posting any knowledge or opinions that are likely to get automatic consensus upvotes. For me, this would be things like defending FLOSS principles against low effort contrarians, defending digital privacy/security against troglydytes, critiquing low quality technology journalism, etc.
- Focus on a subset of knowledge and opinions that aren't held by an obvious majority of commenters.
- Reply to upvoted consensus views that are likely wrong (or at least not backed up by any evidence).
- Try to reply as quickly as possible to maximize the downvotes. Attention span on HN is very short so a well-considered dissident opinion days after the brigading isn't going to get me very far on this quest.