HN Meta: How does downvoting affect you? | Hacker News Reader

HN Meta: How does downvoting affect you?

1 point_blrj3 comments

I've been reading a lot of articles this morning where comments have clearly been downvoted despite providing value to the conversation.

I'm getting tired of this and wondering if others share this sentiment. If there was a good alternative to HN, I would have immediately left due to the dynamic this promotes.

To be able to downvote a comment, you need sufficient karma to do so. At the time of writing this is 500? I'm not sure. As a result, if you're not posting agreeable contributions, you'll never be able to downvote, which is primarily used on HN now for demoting anything other than favorable thought. Additionally, talking about this is actively discouraged in the community.

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This seems to be a prevailing attitude on the web these days, the growing opposition to down voting. This is a bit amusing to me. Aren't people allowed to disagree anymore?

That said, I have a problem with its implementation. I don't like the graying out of the text as its done in HN, or collapsing the post as done elsewhere etc. That is sort of pushing the majority viewpoint on everyone by effectively censoring the less popular ones by hindering access to them. Surely, some of these 'alternates' happen to be downright stupid, inflammatory, abusive etc, but if the uncivil ones are modded off, we are left with stupid ones, and since when is expressing stupidity a crime?

Instead of censoring, why not simply have a sort of visual indicator that a post has garnered several disagreements? May be with a series of red dots with more number indicating more disagreements should serve well.

To specifically answer your question - I don't care much. I mean, this is ultimately just an online forum that has some interesting stuff, nothing more nothing less. There is life beyond the www aka internet.

> Instead of censoring, why not simply have a sort of visual indicator that a post has garnered several disagreements?

Wait, what? That's exactly what HN is doing now!

(Except for some very rare examples marked [flagged] or [deleted] and unreachable, but I see them maybe less than once a week.)

I don't mind the dynamic. It's an expression of the community's values and biases. If I find those values & biases disagreeable, I'll move on. In that way, it's useful to me.

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