There are other significant negatives to HN, too. You have to have the "right" political opinions if you want to avoid massive downvotes, for example. Oh, and don't bother to criticize capitalism one tiny little bit, either.
I like it. It's the only social media where people are actually upvoted for being right. Despite the community growing there's still an emphasis on quality here. If you get downvoted for your political opinion, it's probably because you're just venting a baseless opinion, or you're ranting off-topic. Show me a well reasoned on topic political comment you made that got downvoted and I'll eat my words.
I don't think you generally need much reasoning to argue that people should obey laws and that laws should be enforced. The only surface area I see for disagreement here at all, much less downvoting, is whether one thinks a legally mandated quarantine is a good law at all. My second comment even got flagged for stating that a single person evading a legally-mandated COVID quarantine could do an exponential amount of damage.
If that's not sufficient proof, like I said, I can provide more. I actually abandoned another account here because the downvotes and rate limiting of my account got too annoying to deal with. I can't prove for certain that many of them were downvoted for politically-motivated reasons, but there are many for which I can't see any other likely reason.
I think you got brigaded by the liberty police on that one. But that's deep in a comment tree with a bunch of low effort single line comments. I disregard votes on those anyway because they rarely get more than one upvote.
Second one I agree with you, people are downvoting you because it's conflicting with their beliefs, and since you're not contributing anything particularly insightful you don't get any upvotes to balance that. Also it's such a small thread I don't think you got many downvotes at all.
Third one, I think you're just wrong. You've got an understanding of the word coercion that's not in line with what the majority believes that word entails.
That said, in all three cases I agree with you, but I also don't think your comments are valuable enough to warrant a positive comment score.
