I think the HN culture is slowly dying. Reflexive downvoting has become very common as of late, the eternal September is brining in more people steeped in political hivemindedness. That isn’t to say all is lost, but this site feels markedly different from the beginning of the decade.

How do you know that downvoting is "reflexive" - certainly any time I've been downvoted it was, on reflection, fairly well justified.

Not the person you're replying to but I wrote a script to track when I got upvoted and downvoted and that parsed my comment tree for the past 24hr.

The highest downvote to upvote ratios and highest downvote to comment tree depth increase (i.e. discussion happening) occur in the time periods of 12-1 and 3-4 US East coast time by a factor of about 2. Those are actually the only hours of the day when my account personally (the only one I was tracking) has an upvote/downvote ratio less than 1 (ratio was 1.5-2 for the rest of the day). Based on the fact that I would say that there certainly exists a group of users who "reflexively" downvote. An alternate explanation is that people who hate what I have to say are most likely to use HN during those hours. Both those options seems highly plausible to me.

This analysis is about a year old and based on about 6mo of data. I have since lost the script and the records so don't expect any further analysis.

Do you remember how you got the upvote/downvoted signal? We're you just polling the API and looking at the score?

I looked at my overall karma once per minute and keeping a running total in a text file as well as the increase/decrease from the last file.

For comments I went to https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dsfyu404ed and whatever URL the "more" link was, found every comment of mine that was < 1 day old and then every comment not by me that was a reply to one of those and then listing the ids of additional comments by me and additional replies to my comments for that minute. Comments were tracked by ID to avoid duplicates.

Pages were grabbed with wget and all the parsing was done with the standards linux/bash utilities