HN is an echo chamber, to some extent. For example, try making valid criticisms against Go or JavaScript and you will be downvoted without explanation. I think HN would be better if it required an explanation in order to downvote something. At least then it would be clear to everyone reading whether the negativity was legitimate or not.
Many members find language wars boring. Most are already aware of strengths and weaknesses of various languages. People have language preferences (I know I do), and those vary from person to person. What’s more important is what you’re accomplishing. If you bring up criticism when it’s not the topic of conversation (for example, complaining about the use of JS on a Show HN), people may downvote because it’s off-topic.
As for requiring comments for downvoted, search the archives if you’re really interested in more discussion, but those that aren’t interested in leaving comments are just going to leave junk comments if required, and then there would be endless litigation as to what constitutes a valid reason.
As the guidelines request, just don’t comment about downvotes. If you’re really worried about it, take some time to review the guidelines and look at the behavior of other comments that are downvoted. Speculate to yourself why they might have been downvoted. Improve your own comments taking that into account. But in general, I suggest just not worrying too much about it.
To clarify, I'm not talking about language wars. I'm talking about legitimate constructive criticism on threads about specific languages. My degree is in writing, and I cannot stress enough the importance of criticism in achieving one's highest quality work. Therefore, it seems to me, we would serve ourselves better by considering constructive criticism with an open mind, and working to make our languages better, than to up and down vote based on preferences and emotion. A downvote offered simply because someone said something about one's favorite language is no more intellectual or objective than a commenter who writes, "<whatever language> sucks!" Both should be scorned.
As you say, we all have our favorite languages (all of which have flaws). Mine are currently Elixir and Elm. However, neither of those are perfect and those imperfections can sometimes hinder me. Since, for me, the point of HN is knowledge, it is unhelpful when a critical comment is downvoted, even though it contains good information that would help me in choosing the best language for my project, based entirely on team-sport emotions.
I'm sorry this got long; however, I also wanted to clarify, from my side, your point about the mention of language in an Ask HN post. I did not criticize any language. I was answering someone else's question, and simply used the criticism of popular languages as an example. Yes, you could argue that their question itself was off-topic, but since the point of HN, at least for me, is knowledge, I did what I could to answer it. I'm not remotely concerned about karma points, as you can probably tell from the age of my account vs. my low karma score. I'm on "the spectrum" and tend to rub people the wrong way all the time. I'm used to it and I don't expect to be treated any differently here. My only criticism is that many of the downvotes are emotional and unhelpful, and HN should do what it can to eliminate worthless downvotes the same way it tries to eliminate worthless comments.
> Point out that a clever solution is not that useful or applicable and you get a lot of downvotes
I have exactly the opposite impression, that this is one of the easiest ways to get cheap upvotes. So much so that we have to moderate to prevent such subthreads from choking out others.
See what I mean? Hehe. You asked. I answered, with a purposeful example to illustrate, and there’s the immediate downvote. Thanks for making my point, to whoever did.
