I've made a few downvoted comments. One was flagged and removed, and drew a rebuke from dang (on the Slashdot sale story, as it happens), and though my initial comment was perhaps to telegraphically negative, there was substance there.
Also: while it does little good to complain about downvotes as the OP, I've occasionally noted comments in which the downvote brigade strikes me as emotional and/or hivemindish. I'll also frequently drop to the bottom of long threads and upvote comments I feel are getting undue negation even where I disagree with the contents.
This last: so long as the sentiments seem grounded in facts and reason, I don't believe any comment should be greyed.
As for moderation in general, it's a Hard Problem. HN is coasting largely on a community that has good, though far from perfect tendencies. I've seen far too many discussion systems be overwhelmed by the combination of toxic social dynamics and poorly conceived moderation systems. HN suffers only one of those handicaps, for now.
More on moderation:
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28jfk4/content...
Post away. Sometimes, I have been known to rethink my position (not a bad thing) when I get downvotes. Sometimes I even change my mind when good arguments surface. I learn this way.
But what's far worse is that the moderation of Hacker News functions with very little transparency. Even just Googling for the moderator `dang` turns up a lot of angry rants on other blogs and in other sections of the internet, full of people who feel wronged by black-box and one-sided moderation.
It can be quite psychologically upsetting to post a comment, fall victim to group-think downvoting, try to add clarity or try to defend yourself against unreasonable comments, and then find yourself on the non-negotiable end of a black-box moderation action.
If it was just meaningless karma downvotes, few would care. It's the actually hurtful responses and, there's no other way to put it, mean-spirited moderation activity that give pause.
And I'm speaking as someone with a lot of anti-authoritarian tendencies. I'm not shy at all about speaking my mind and I struggle with finding a way to feign respect for authority apparatuses that are not legitimate, like HN moderation. If I feel this apprehension and backlash, I can only imagine that more timid readers feel it to a much more damaging degree.
(Of course, this is just my opinion. I have no idea if it's true.)
One recent example was a useless conversation about whether the US was a democracy or a republic, with 10 different people saying the same thing. Those 10 comments with replies fill several scrolling pages, so the real topic of conversation is buried.
In fact, I think it would be a good thing if it was made impossible for moderators to detach comments that receive enough up-votes, or have child comments (especially comments that disagree) with many up-votes.
In those cases, it's clear that community members get value from the comment, which should infinitely override bespoke opinions of whether it's "on topic enough" to remain -- those subjective opinions ought to count for way less than simply observing whether there are up votes or replies.
Your comment that it "derail[s] a thread" makes the implicit assumption that the comments are actually off-topic. If they are on-topic, but you happen to have the opinion that they aren't (even thought they are) then it's not derailing anything, it's just a healthy reflection of the comment-generating process that is "the pool of all HN readers." I think of it like the John Lennon quote: "Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted."
I don't have a magic answer for how to accurately detect off-topic diversions in a way that satisfied most people most of the time. All I'm saying is that upon seeing a healthy back and forth, it should give me a lot of pause that if I merely think it's off topic, I am probably wrong, and it's just an opinion that should not be indulged by moderator activity.
There was another example of derailment recently, with a dozen comments arguing over what a "middleman" is when the original comment was really about how best to support indie makers.
Anyway, thanks for the interesting discussion, and I hope I haven't made this thread less useful for someone else in the process.
Further, if there are enough replies in a given thread such that your down votes on all of them were enough to lead to a ban, it strongly suggests that the thread really was on-topic, that it generated valuable interest and discussion, and that actually it's just a controversial thread (one you may not like perhaps), but clearly not off topic.
I do see this a lot on HN. When a thread is controversial in a way that HN group-think disapproves of, then "off topic" is used as an inappropriate excuse to down vote it, try to derail any discussion about it, etc.
For example, I think effectively all of the stuff from the subreddit TheRedPill is utter nonsense, and it's often very controversial and I dislike it when some of it appears here at HN.
But it's rarely actually off topic when it's brought up, and it generates actual community interest (usually from people who rightfully point out how problematic and baseless it is).
I'd rather that controversial topics and tangents, even when they are things I don't like, are permitted when they clearly generate community engagement, than to basically have some implicit HN blacklist of disallowed topics that are facetiously treated as off-topic as a way to simply exclude unapproved opinions.
(I'm preemptively sorry if I end up delving into the realm of armchair psychology here)
Is it possible that, if you know you tend to look for authoritarian themes in the artifacts you interact with, that maybe part of your perception is the result of false positives magnified by the emotional impact of the administrative action?
There's always some subjective elements to imposing community rules as a moderator -- that's common in every community, ever. What would be less expected is malice in those actions.
I also don't think that bad moderator actions are common either. Most users probably don't even notice it. It's arguable that this makes it even worse, since it's harder to get the community to care about healthy community-approved policies if they are only protecting a handful of people who are sometimes outside of the HN group-think.
But there's no reason to spend time on a comment if you know it will get downvotes and subsequently ignored. It's like yelling into a brick wall.
The problem is that when they get downvoted they don't produce any response, and if nobody is going to do anything based on what you write, why write it at all? You might as well start yelling at the walls.
Sometimes I might recognize legitimate reasons for getting down voted, in this case I clarify or review my opinion
But sometimes I just keep the comment there, because that's my opinion and hopefully some other person shares it as well even if it costs some down votes
I never care if people vote me down. I have been downvoted often. It's just a convenient way to censor unwelcome messages.
If people don't want to listen to you even when you have good arguments then the downvoters aren't worth your opinion. Their response however points out if they have something important to say which could question your point of view so that you can use it to advance your own view.
Aren't there effects of downvotes like rate limiting and post position?
It accumulated quite a number of up votes as well.
Like, "I got shadow-banned for this comment about memory management in iOS" "... you sure it wasn't for this comment from a few hours earlier about how people who vote for the other political party are [long list of expletives]?"
I'll see if I can get the account details because it's renewed my interest.
At one point he wholesale deleted a comment of mine because it was widely misinterpreted in a sexist way (I clarified to multiple people, but it wasn't enough apparently). The sad part is the only ones being sexist were the ones interpreting it that way, I was personally shocked that so many people thought I was being sexist.
And that was just the last time he stepped in, he had been threatening me repeatedly, and why? My best guess is either
a) because I was having a conversation with another poster in which he came in and bitched at them, only I defended that poster, or b) after I was "flag bombed" (I think that's the term?) for having an opinion many didn't like [1].
I'm not sure which because they were both a part of the same thread, but immediately after I started seeing deng everywhere, threatening me repeatedly. I've been online long enough to know what being targetted by a mod looks like.
This idea that you shouldn't be self censoring on HN is naive. It means you haven't attracted deng's ire (or one of the other mods) or said something that was truly an "unsafe" minority opinion.
There's apparently another person who won't allow linking from HN I believe? I don't know the full story behind that, but I can absolutely understand that person's opinion of HN.
HN is honestly one of the oppressive environments for actual discourse I've seen and that's not a joke. The only site I can think of off the top of my head that's unequivocally worse is hubski.com.
The poster who spoke about 4chan is spot on. You can optimize for good discussion or you can optimize for feel good politeness, but you can't optimize for both. Most communities attempt to balance it, but HN leans far to the side of feel good politeness. You don't actually come to HN for discussion, you come to HN to make comments on random things that pop up. Unfortunately, some mistake that for discussion, but I'm of the opinion those folks don't actually understand what a good discussion is.
To end this post, I'm just going to say I find your opinion to be horrifically naive. Even now I know the reaction is going to be folks piling on to tell me how great a person deng is, and I'll find myself taking another multi-month long hiatus from HN until deng (once again) forgets about me.
I've been online for entirely too long.
[1] The poster I defended took issue with my opinion and we were going round and round about it and deng apparently thought he was getting too heated. I was the recipient of said "heat" and I disagreed.