As I understand it, -4 is the lowest you can get (basically everyone hates your point of view), so you may have found a bug but more likely found 5 or so people who don’t like you quicker than expected!

I have seen (my) posts bounce up and down so there I suspect there is a lot of Voting going on compare to actual movement. But in the end HN is biased for positivity (as you cannot go lower than -4)

But someone with sight of codebase might have more useful comments

Original poster of the thread here.

Doesn't appear to be negative anymore, but here is what it looked like: https://vale.rocks/micros/20260512-0652

Screenshot was taken at 06:50 UTC.

When I click on 'A HN post with negative points – how?' from the HN homepage (currently ranked 12 for me), it goes to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48104663 instead of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48106316 (I found the latter via google search for the title string)

I suspect the same is happening for some others too, based on the comments on that article.

Bizarre!

Update: 2 minutes later and the link from the hn home page now correctly leads to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48106316

Never seen that happen before.

I bet some anti-spam measure was inadvertently tripped that dampened the submission popularity, while a bug failed to conceal it.

Take this post for instance, the link to the upvote is https://news.ycombinator.com/vote?id=48106316&how=up&auth=26...

If you change `how=up` to `how=down` it downvotes the post.

I tried it once, didn't change the vote count, but I issued the inverse operation with `how=un` and the vote count went up, so I'm guessing someone upvoted at the same time I downvoted. That or it doesn't really work like it says it does, but it does respond with a 301 followed by an OK, so I think this works.

OP should have archived the page when the count was negative.

Here's a snapshot from when the count was 0 https://web.archive.org/web/20260512115623/https://news.ycom...

Someone should email dang as that would be a bug or a fundamental design change or a site compromise. hn@ycombinator.com

HN has the oddest karma system. I've seen submissions get 3 upvotes in the first minute and never another upvote.

HN has downvotes but you need to have enough karma to access the feature.

On HN I almost never downvote. On reddit this was different. Not sure why but I feel that on HN karma is so much harder to get that I don't want to be an obstacle. On reddit I could more easily downvote. It also was easier to get karma. (Reddit is annoying with regards to its censorship though. That is one arbitrary censorship over there ...)

Now upvoted, but it was negative

This reminds me, I've wanted to make a bot to automatically upvote the most downvoted posts in a thread with the HN api. I'd call it anti-echochamber.HN or something like that.

Karma systems in general are opaque. The assumed or advertised behavior is never fully accurate, if it was, it would be all too easy to game.

Bots. I've posted many popular and unpopular takes here. Down always comes first, and as the bot votes evap into the ether, the true human take is almost always revealed after an hour or two.

Behold: my account has -1 karma.