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Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

While it is true that sometimes valid, yet unpopular, opinions get downvoted and buried, most of the times the things getting downvoted and buried are simply comments or opinions that are worthless. They are either trolls, racist, or derogatory comments that I WANT to have hidden from my view.

I think the upvote/downvote system is what makes reddit so popular, since it acts to filter out the useless comments that often fill up other forums.

Unless you have VERY active moderators in those other forums, you will be inundated by useless comments.

Now, reddit's system is not perfect, but the hiding of some comments is certainly a feature and not a shortcoming of the platform.

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Though it certainly isn’t a perfect solution for all use-cases, I think the comment system is so incredibly useful for the things it does well that it’s worth dealing with it’s issues. Key example for me is getting answers to questions without someone’s personal bias / agenda leaking through. Five years ago if I had a question about, say, which vitamin supplement brands are good quality, I would have googled it and imply clicked on one of the first few links. In all likelihood that would have led me to a blog post written by one single person making recommendations based on who pays them affiliate dollars. THese days though, I do the same search, but I append “reddit” to the end of the query. Invariably someone has already asked the same question in a subreddit, and the first comment is an answer that survived the onslaught of downvotes that come from spam, bias, etc.

It’s not a perfect system, but it’s loss better than the next best option.

“most of the times the things getting downvoted and buried are simply comments or opinions that are worthless.”

What is your basis for saying “most” of the time. This is very different from my experience and I find it difficult to measure as groupthink prevents discussion, so what do you measure.

I’ve watched many subs for hobbies I follow get boringer and boringer as mods try to enforce various rules and start moderating what’s appropriate or not. As a result, discussion kind of stopped. So I’m glad your experience is that mostly racists get banned, but I’ve seen discussions on /r/badhistory devolve into weird gender/race discussions that don’t really have a productive outcome.

>They are either trolls, racist, or derogatory comments that I WANT to have hidden from my view.

This view is pretty naive. I suspect you just don't hold any opinions against the groupthink of the subreddits you participate in.

I think when its moderated away, it often shows bias. But when its downvoted away, in subreddits which have constituency that shows proper reasoning skills, I tend to agree that its all about quality of the comment.

A controversial comment does in fact command a higher burden of proof. Thus the comment has to be of even higher quality. And when it is, I feel it survives the downvotes.

At least I've generally been able to go against the group think and survive downvotes. But generally you need a clear argument, have a real point, and not show bias.

Now, it won't always fly, but I think high quality controversial comments can.

Well they can't unless there are no other groupthink comments present. By definition a controversial comment isn't getting upvotes from a significant portion of the group so any regular "good" comment will quickly push it down to the bottom.

If the majority of your group is rational, a rational comment will not be controversial even if the view is unpopular. However, the vast majority of the population is not rational when it comes to reading unpopular opinions and that shows in every subreddit.

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