I agree that training on copyrighted material is violating the law, but not for the reasons you stated.

That said, this comment is funny to me because I’ve done the same thing too, take some signal of disagreement, and assume the signal means I’m right and there’s a low-key conspiracy to hold me down, when it was far more likely that either I was at least a bit wrong, or said something in an off-putting way. In this case, I tend to agree with the general spirit of the sibling comment by @williamcotton in that it seems like you’re inventing some criteria that are not covered by copyright law. Copyrights cover the “fixation” of a work, meaning they protect only its exact presentation. Copyrights do not cover the Madlibs or Cliff Notes scenarios you proposed. (Do think about Cliff Notes in particular and what it implies about AI - Cliff Notes are explicitly legal.)

Personally, I’ve had a lot of personal forward progress on HN when I assume that downvotes mean I said something wrong, and work through where my own assumptions are bad, and try to update them. This is an important step especially when I think I’m right.

I’m often tempted to ask for downvote explanations too, but FWIW, it never helps, and aside from HN guidelines asking people to avoid complaining about downvotes, I find it also helps to think of downvotes as symmetric to upvotes. We don’t comment on or demand an explanation for an upvote, and an upvote can be given for many reasons - it’s not only used for agreement, it can be given for style, humor, weight, engagement, pity, and many other reasons. Realizing downvotes are similar and don’t only mean disagreement helps me not feel personally attacked, and that can help me stay more open to reflecting on what I did that is earning the downvotes. They don’t always make sense, but over time I can see more places I went wrong.

> or said something in an off-putting way

It shouldn't matter.

Currently, downvote means "I want this to be ranked lower". There really should be 2 options "factually incorrect" and "disagree". For people who think it should matter, there should be a third option, "rude", which others can ignore.

I've actually emailed about this with a mod and it seems he conflated talking about downvotes with having to explain a reason. He also told me (essentially) people should not have the right to defend themselves against incorrect moderator decisions and I honestly didn't know what to say to that, I'll probably message him again to confirm this is what he meant but I don't have high hopes after having similar interactions with mods on several different sites.

> FWIW, it never helps

The way I see it, it helped since I got 2 replies with more stuff to read about. Did you mean it doesn't work for you?

> downvotes as symmetric to upvotes

Yes, and we should have more upvote options too. I am not sure the explanation should be symmetric though.

Imagine a group conversation in which somebody lies (the "factually incorrect" case here). Depending on your social status within the group and group politics, you might call out the lie in public, in private with a subset or not at all. But if you do, you will almost certainly be expected to provide a reasoning or evidence.

Now imagine he says something which is factually correct. If you say you agree, are you expected to provide references why? I don't think so.

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BTW, on a site which is a more technical alternative to HN, there was recently a post about strange behavior of HN votes. Other people posted their experience with downvotes here and they mirrored mine - organic looking (i.e. gradual) upvotes, then within minutes of each other several downvotes. It could be coincidence but me and others suspect voting rings evading detection.

I also posted a link to my previous comment as an experiment - if people disagree, they are more likely to also downvote that one. But I did not see any change there so I suspect it might be bots (which are unlikely to be instructed to also click through and downvote there). Note sample size is 1 here, for now.