As I've pointed out before either there is a change in policy or we got some unusually active downvoters recently. I don't know and I don't have time to research it but I guess someone with admin access could do some kind of query on users with unusual amount of downvotes?
I habitually downvote discussions about downvoting as they pretty much always distract from the topic at hand and really aren't all that interesting in themselves.
The best approach to being downvoted is not to woundedly post asking why you were downvoted, but to wait. If your post has genuine value, it will almost always be voted back up. This has happened to me more times than I can count.
If your post is not upvoted over time, perhaps you're wrong about its value. Certainly the community disagrees with you. That questioning should be directed inwardly. Perhaps sometimes the answer will be that you don't care if the community disagrees with you, you still feel your point was justified. That also happens to me.
I understand the emotional impulse to question what a poster feels to be an injustice, but all they're really doing is indulging their emotional impulse at the expense of actual on-topic and interesting discussion.
Sometimes, the way to improve your skill at communicating is getting feedback from the community.
Further, you can't assume that someone asking for such feedback is asking in a defensive way. Although that often happens, the written text is a poor way of judging that. Spoken tonality is more accurate. If you're interpreting a request for feedback as one coming out of being "wounded", that is more likely to be a projection of your own habits of communication and psyche than what is actually happening.
Thanks, seeing the discussion, for a moment I thought I'm the only one thinking this way.
Regarding people suggesting to "look into myself what I did wrong" - I was totally flabbergasted as to why I was downvoted, that's exactly why I wanted to ask and, hopefully, learn something. The only ideas I had were those I listed, but none seemed to match.
Now, from the comments I learned something, that the quotes I used were apparently seen by some as "selective" and/or not reflecting the message of the article. Now, this at least explains somewhat the reasons, and for this I'm grateful; although I actually still can't say I agree, given that: 1) I believe I'd personally rather comment instead of downvoting in such case; 2) quoting is always more or less selective, yet here the quotes are quite large, and I'd still stand by opinion they do reflect the contents of the article; 3) the movie is composed fully of assertive sentences, and the quote and the article do counter them explicitly (e.g. movie: wolves -> willows grow higher; article: willows don't grow higher) and references multiple scientifical studies for that IIUC; 4) actually one of most important reasons I admire HN is when people provide calm but strong counterarguments to anything with quotes and references to scientifical papers, so that's what I try to do too...
I see and I used to agree although I usually didn't care to do that myself. Lately I find a lot of the downvoting that has been going on has been so stupid that the stupid "why the downvotes?" question has seemed relevant.
My theory is that we're seeing the influx of Reddit members.
There's evidence even this thread, as in the children of this parent (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8449500). Comments that add nothing meaningful, often contributing nothing other than snark or inane "Internet comedy".
There is much that is positive about Reddit, and much that is negative. Something HN doesn't need is the blatant downvoting because of mere differences in opinion.
Personally, I wish HN didn't have a downvote button at all, but that we could leave actual moderation to moderators.
