Irrelevance seems to be a greater danger to the comments here than the method of disagreements.
The comments are a place for discussing the content of the submitted article. They are not a place for complaining about the NYTimes registration, light text on a dark background, etc...
But a down-vote has negative social consequences. It affects the types of comment that show up and shapes and refines the tone here so that eventually only the popular types show up.
The assumption that bad comments will get less votes is a canard. As the community grows, the same people adding comments also add their votes. If anything, they're more likely to vote since it's just a click, and so noob votes will drown old users even more. It's not just downvotes but any votes that have negative social consequences.
Update
[1] Exhibit A: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021157
>It's not just downvotes but any votes that have negative social consequences.
Upvotes also tend to select for popular modes of thinking. In the end, a system of only upvotes makes people want to only post things that will be perceived as popular by the community.
Positive reinforcement does have the advantage of encouraging more participation.
This is one of the rare cases where humor bought upvotes. I'd say for every 10 evenly mildly humorous comments, 9 of them are voted down.
But a) I see a couple of upvoted funnies everyday, and b) things are worse than they were a year ago. I'm joining in the fuss about it in hopes that we can stem the rot.
On digg the average quality of the posts dropped to near youtube levels, and on reddit the community fractured to extremes of opinion.
When I did get a response as to why, the self-justifications were fairly alarming.
Of course, if you notice it doesn't stop me, but that's because I'm a stubborn stick in the mud. I suspect that loads of people who are not as thick skinned as I am are afraid.
I mean if you weren't upvoted, I doubt that would discourage you from posting stuff.
Why? What have you to fear from being down voted?
Of course someone like you will agree to this article, you constantly disagree on this form. You just use this to reinforce your one-sided view.
I can't believe that you would just blindly agree to anything Paul Graham says so casually.
I honestly can't understand why you listen to Paul Graham. He is a known ignorant programmer who just thinks he can run companies.
Complaining about other news in a comment about something different is a good thing, people get to have discussions and often an interesting point related to the article as well as other articles that may be related or come out at the same time emerge. If you look at articles even from today with tangents, you will notice irrelevance gets down-voted quickly.
"Irrelevance seems to be a greater danger to the comments here than the method of disagreements"
I can't disagree more. We don't sort responses on a user-preference level. Responses are sorted based on relevance. Each response is ranked by other uses of hacker news thus getting the irrelevant down the list quickly. After a few screens on any topic on hacker news you will start to get to irrelevance, and even when browsing you will see points, which help you immediately ignore a response, hell irrelevant ones get discolored.
I think you are totally off with your point. Basically the biggest issue we face on hacker news is the threat of being invaded by those same people who bicker on other sites. Nothing gives me chills more than thinking that MasterPlanSoftware from thedailywtf.com will hit up this site and start posting. His posts were usually DH1 (with an occasional DH2) and he would keep going. An even worse fear is that spectateswamp will look in our direction (please google him, also see www.thestupidestmanonearth.com). When articles like why's disappearance start filling up 1-2 pages of articles on HN is when these fears get surfaced again. Fortunately we were moderated well so that when such problems occur we get massive posts about erlang driving the non-believers away. So in the end, I think hacker news is perfect.
Hows that? as a side note I disagree with everything I just said
On an internet forum you usually don't know the person writing (unless you keep track of usernames). And no viewpoint is so extreme or bizarre that there isn't someone somewhere on the internet saying the same thing in all seriousness. You cannot detect irony just by looking at the post in isolation.
Irony can be detected when are familiar with the poster or the general sentiments on the forum, and detect when something is so far removed from the norm that is must be ironic. In turn irony can be used as a marker for group - everyone in the group know what you are supposed to say, an therefore can easily detect when the group members are being ironic. Outsiders will not understand the irony and get confused.
Hence "you have no sense of irony" actually means "you haven't been on the forum long enough to be familiar with the comme il faut viewpoints and language used here. You are not part of the club."
I'm curious.