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Comment by tnmrnis | Hacker News Reader

The similar thing is happening all over europe right know. Right-leaning voters don't want to identify themselves because the negative social implications can be quite significant.

Also the west seem to have lost its debate culture. These days most debates of conservatives and progressives in shouting 'commie' and 'racist' at each other. In a good debate you wanna help your opponent to give the best possible argument for his position and then try to disprove it. Everything else is lazy and not beneficial for anyone.

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> Also the west seem to have lost its debate culture.

That, more than anything.

Debate competitions have devolved into some sort of speed-talking, where the number of arguments that the opponent needs to address is more important than the substance of the points themselves.

There's a RadioLab episode about that at http://www.radiolab.org/story/debatable/ An example they use is that if a debater A has six points in his speech that need to be addressed, and the opponent B only addresses four, A wins by default, since there were two points that were unaddressed.

It reminds me a lot about this election, where there's so much polluting the discourse that there's no time to address the substance (and it plays better to the audience, as Moonves stated).

A key problem is that the internet, which should be the best debating forum ever created, is actually a waste of time because of downvotes.

I hate downvote buttons. Programmers seem to put them there only because we demand symmetry. If there's a plus there must also be a minus. I rarely, if ever, see negative votes used to suppress actual spam or obvious trolling ... the only place I've ever seen that actually happen is on Slashdot where the system actually does suppress auto-generated garbage, page-widening posts, etc. Everywhere else people use +/- buttons to indicate disagreement.

Unfortunately, the further left you go, the more you become convinced that people who disagree with you are dumb and easily manipulated. Thus suppressing opinions you disagree with becomes more and more acceptable. Thus downvoting any right-wing thinking into invisibility becomes not just acceptable but important. This trend of course culminates in far-left communist countries where political censorship is an official state policy.

So people with those opinions then rapidly learn that they aren't welcome, that people aren't interested in real debate ... and leave. Forums that could have been debating centers for mutual understanding turn into echo chambers.

The solution is to eliminate downvoting and do what Slashdot does: require you to pick a reason when upvoting, use randomly chosen moderators, and meta-moderate the moderators.

At least in the US, it's been gone since the Nixon era. I was too young to vote in Carter v. Reagan, but the hyperbole around his candidacy was amazing. I remember my parents being freaked out when McGovern lost in 1972; it was the end of the world...

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