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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Downvotes to express disagreement are part of the ethos of this site; it's a norm Paul Graham established almost a decade ago. But comments discussing downvotes are not; the guidelines specifically ask us not to waste time litigating them, which is what this thread basically asks everyone to do.

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I interpreted the rules to mean that it's bad to discuss down voting in threads because it makes boring reading and distracts from the original topic. This topic however is about down voting, so I felt it was okay.

No, what you're supposed to do is either realize what you did to get downvoted and adjust your behavior to better conform to Hacker News culture, or else stop caring and continue to be downvoted. Complaining about it is a waste of time.

I'm complaining because in my experience, it has destroyed a lot of interesting discussions for me. It's less about my experience making comments but more about reading other comment threads that get killed or discussions becoming intense circlejerks.

Hacker News has never been about free and open discussion, unfortunately.

I use the userscript I have linked in my profile to disable the fade for downvoted comments but there's only so much you can do.

And to be fair... there are some subjects for which Hacker News has proven less than capable of maintaining civil discourse, and some subjects like mainstream news and politics which are legitimately off topic. But it would be nice if people learned to just ignore sentiments they both disagreed with and were neither willing or capable of a reply to, and just hid threads they didn't want to participate in.

Thanks for the userscript! I'm going to try it out.

edit: fun note, we joined HN basically at the same time

Comments with the cj word are autokilled.

It's still really boring and has been rehashed many times (as has the 'thing X of HN is getting worse' bit). What's even worse, as you can see here in thread, it brings out the sort of people who really enjoy talking at length about these things, insist people who disagree with them owe them a Coq proof demonstrating the faults in their logic, bemoan the suppression of (nay, censorship!) of dissenting opinions, and on and on. None of the times this has come up (about monthly or so) over the years have made any of these points less repetitive, mush-headed and tedious.

Something much more common and harmful to the quality of discussion is dumb stuff getting upvoted. Oddly, you never see anyone meta-fuss about that.

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