Please stop doing this. As per the guidlines(https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html):

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email us and we'll look at the data.

People are downvoting you in good faith, and they're trying to disagree with you and send a message. If we look at your comment history, your comments are you plugging your own personal project. And you keep getting downvoted because you are hijacking the conversation and redirecting it to something you built, that people did not explicitly ask for or express interest in. And so when you keep doing that, people will feel like it's spam. To make matters worse, instead of taking the subtle cue of a downvote to mean that you're doing something wrong, you seem to deny that and instead conspiratorially deflect blame and personal responsibility towards someone else.

My suggestion is to submit your product as a new post. If people do not express interest in it, that indicates an issue with how you have designed your product, or marketed and positioned it. Take the reception that you get there, whatever it is, in good faith. It's clear you have a lot of ideas around your project and what motivated it that pertain to society at large. That leads me to my second suggestion:

Try to consider what your values and beliefs are and how you would respond if you were not working on this project. This is your null hypothesis. Try to think about your project the same way others will, which is that without momentum it will likely fail. Make conversation based on that. And then, if you find that people are interested in what your values are that lead you to start this project, maybe after they express interest, gently plug your project. But if you try and shove something people want down other people's throats, you're just going to alienate others and drive them away. And then your project will fail, as it should, because you didn't build something that people truly wanted.

Consider this... various person constantly complains publicly of the symptoms of lead poisoning, or smoking. They say this is a terrible issue for many people in their community, but their solutions are all missing the core problem — the lead poisoning. You try to respond every time that the real issue is lead poisoning, and what’s more, there are alternatives. They should really consider them.

I’ve tried mentioning OTHER projects instead of my own. Then I was accused of shilling them!

If all you want is commisseration and platitudes then that’s what will happen. I have been on HN for over 10 years and have seen the same exact complaints over and over. People need to realize they are all related and there is a straightforward solution.

I am not the one complaining of the side effects of the problem. I am simply replying and describing the real problem and what is the correct solution. And I don’t want to copypaste a wall of text, or say too much in here so I have to link to something. To what? Well, I have written materials that explore every facet of this problem, and to software that has solved it. Here are some others:

  Matrix
  Mastodon
  Inrupt
  MaidSAFE (my favorite)
  IPFS
  Dat

I am totally fine with being downvoted, or people disagreeing with me. In fact I am looking for a discussion in which I get to learn something. But none of that follows. It’s always the same. Comment about decentralization = upvote or neutral. Comment followed by links to actual solutions of any kind, which are absolutely free and open source = heavy, heavy downvote. No discussion. No reply. Just silent downvotes.

So I have started explicitly asking for the downvoters to simply engage in substantive discussion.

No, the discussion we're having is the discussion we're supposed to have, although I don't think it's the one you would have liked. You are generally not having discussions on this forum that reflect that you understand its conventions.

> Well, I have written materials that explore every facet of this problem, and to software that has solved it.

You clearly don't have a community already invested in what you have to say about the state of the problem, never mind your solutions to it. So I'd say take a step back and prove that you can build a community that cares about the problems you are trying to solve, whether through a mailing list, IRC channel, slack group, twitter list. Once you have built that community, it's a lot more likely that you'll have a group consensus to what the problem is, which is a necessary foundation for you to build any kind of a solution.

If you did have that foundation, you wouldn't be spamming project links on hacker news. Forget about your software. Focus on the foundation it will require to be successful. Focus on discovering what you can write about that will actually win people's hearts and minds, with evidence. Focus on what things you think and you express that resonate with a community, that they'll go to bat for. This is extremely hard and failure-prone. But if you can't do that, you'll never successfully build a solution that gets adoption. You do want the solution you build to be used, right? Then focus, really focus, on community building first.

Best of luck.

Thank you, this is very good advice.

And yeah, I have a bad habit of "doing the hard things" and taking risks to engage smart people in conversations, sometimes stupidly (because I walk into a group which has been conditioned against, say, cryptocurrency, and try to present my case). I do it to improve my own communication skills and also understand the dynamics on "hard mode".

I've focused on the foundation. I just didn't want to mention it here. I wanted to see if smart people would talk about the real problems for their own sake, and not just getting on the bandwagon of something already successful. But, I've learned over the last 10-15 years that this is largely a waste of time. Time could be better spent actually building the thing you're talking about.

I'll try to be a bit smarter about it in the future. It's the same impulse that makes people get into Twitter wars for no reason and waste time.

Treating life like it's a video game or an exercise in contrarianism is adolescent and borderline antisocial. Just don't do this. Trying to convert people is incredibly hostile, presumptuous and condescending and presumes you know better than their existing notions without even asking them about it or any kind of discussion or successful convincing. It's an easy way to lose the potential trust of acquaintances who have very little incentive to listen to you unless you earn their attention. I'm not saying not to ever approach things this way, but know when it's not appropriate. If you have to ask, it's probably not.

I know I said that you should try your hand at building a community, but that's hard and it can fail as well too. Perhaps it's worth at least proving to yourself that you can function as an active member inside of a community without getting regularly downvoted.

Don't malign "the bandwagon of something already successful" as if it's so trivial. They're succeeding and you are not. There was a lot of work and cleverness involved in them building that territory. They will remain on top until they are out-executed.

I would def welcome any constructive suggestions on how to make it more relevant. I want the problem and solution to be clear.

...and that's where you lost us. You even acknowledge that people downvote you when mention your own company, so why keep doing it?

Also, you're not supposed to be meta on HN. First rule of downvoting: you don't talk about downvoting.

1. Just write some text with no deeper details

2. There is a ton to say. And I have said it. But the links go to my domain

3. I have tried linking to other domains - youtube, other projects - the result is the same. Downvotes and accused of shilling those projects

My man question is: how can I properly link to more information and the actual built solution without pissing people off? Every time I do, many people explore it and it is a net positive. But many people are pissed off.

I agree I am too enthusiastic given the mindset on HN. That’s because I’m trying to make a clear case for what I see is the real problem and solution. If I only cared to describe the problem, I’d get massive reshares. Been there done that.

Just look at the news — problems in society are all they are about these days. But how many news about everyday solutions are reshared? Not anything revolutionary, just basic things? That is considered as “sales”. Even if the project is open source and free.

I am just sort of doing this to get feedback / sociological research on a site with a lot of smart people. Yes it is very meta. And I don’t want to break the rules too much. I think I am going to stop asking for a discussion — but since I have done so above already, let’s have one. I am looking to learn about how to deliver actual solutions properly to communities who are accustomed to reject bad faith actors.