Of course. I feel more comfortable speaking my mind under a more anonymous account. Even then I'm pretty measured, I just don't want to deal with potential headaches in my professional career.
Not really the ideal way to approach HN, although understandable.
If you're considering HN from a forum perspective, the best advice I've read is to think of 'points' as currency to spend on unpopular opinions. After a certain point, you can 'afford' to say whatever's on your mind (within reason). Reddit is the same. You rack up 'karma' so that you can afford to take some downvotes for speaking your mind.
Now, the other dynamic is that some people here expect to see and work with other HN folks in the real world. THAT is more chilling, and I don't think one could be one's 'authentic self' in that instance unless you're already a 'name' who doesn't need to give a rip about others' opinions.
> the best advice I've read is to think of 'points' as currency to spend on unpopular opinions. After a certain point, you can 'afford' to say whatever's on your mind (within reason).
That's not really correct; downvotes on HN hide your comment and it eventually becomes dead (it can also become dead if super-users flag it); then it will only be visible for users who are logged in and have explicitly opt-in in seeing dead comments.
So no, you can't use your karma to go against the hive mind on HN, your comment will just be flagged and hidden completely.
I tend to wonder what the heck I said that caused an unexpected downvote.
I tend to get grumpy when an expected one happens, there are many unwritten rules on HN.
I tend to defend against imagined arguments with my statements, and against corner cases far, FAR too much. Getting those imagined arguments wrong doesn't help either.
I do notice that things that are inconvenient but true tend to take a hit, then rise back over time, so that's a good thing.
I genuinely don't care. I've questioned downvotes I've received before, but usually it's just because I want to know why I might have had a bad take or how I might be looking at things wrong.
Respectfully, I know nobody here and you all mean nothing to my life, which is much broader than what I post here, so what do your judgements matter to me? What do these points actually mean that I should choose not to be myself because of them? The answer, to both, is nothing.
How many of us will not be our authentic selves in a comment because of fear of how others might react? I know that I have done this.