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Comment by mr_spothawk | Hacker News Reader

this argument does resonate.

i started getting downvoted a lot. since then, i've become much more of a lurker and have remained logged-out.

to me it's obvious, and necessarily the case, that the conversation happening is not representative of my views because i'm not sharing them. it's not worth it to me to contribute to the conversation, and get embroiled in an accidental dispute.

my views are my own, and i don't need to spend a lot of time sharing them at other people in order to live a satisfied life.

the internet, like the real world before it, is not my own space... and to the extent that i exist in it, i'm happier going my own way and not encountering lame-o jerks.

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I've gone from being an admin and owner of popular forums back in the early 2000's to just a lurker who 98% of the time will write a response but just delete it before it's posted because I don't need or want the hassle of an internet argument. I'm proud of even posting this. Maybe this is my one post for 2019. :)

I also have 100,000 posts scattered about forums from the early 2000's, but very few (less than 1,000) since after 2010. The trend towards downvote groupthink is not an insignificant part of the reason I've dropped content generation.

Thanks for sharing this. It's an interesting trend that I was not aware of (but maybe intuited?). It does seem that, while on the one hand, upvotes are necessary for ranking crowdsourced content on HN and reddit, on the other hand, the voting on comments is responsible for the groupthink/hivemind/echo chamber that develops.

In terms of fostering discussion, the comment voting is a silent killer.

In my experience, the worst aspect of current boards are the lifetime of threads. If you post a comment to a thread, and come back to the page couple hours later, the thread is no longer available anywhere; now you have to create the additional loop of going through your user account, locate each comment, and check whether anyone replied to it. I'd rather save myself the hassle and just shut up for the most part. And even if I do bother to find particular comment, seek out replies, and respond to them, they will go unnoticed if it's not done immediately, because it also requires the other users to go through these additional steps too. It's just impossible to write comments that have more than a couple of hours gap between responses.

Non English forums tend to be much more diverse in my experience simply by having a smaller audience. You can argue with ignorant Joe on a small forum since there only a handful of people are active at any time and everybody knows everybody else, but you can't argue with the seemingly infinite stream of ignorant people on a larger forum like the main subreddits.

I agree with this. I suspect that any community with “downvoting” or similar would skew more forward outliers, because the prevailing group-think will downvote contrary content and getting downvoted stings, scaring off many who might otherwise add diverse perspectives.

But even without voting mechanisms, nasty replies are just as bad or worse, so the general trend of chasing off the people who see things a little differently seems pretty universal to me.

I walked around the problem of replies(on Reddit/HN) by never looking at them. I have a red envelope of 150 or so now.

Every once in a while I imagine something anxiety inducing about them, or catch a glimpse(and more often than not a positive one) in the automatic reply emails Reddit likes to send me. Sometimes I will look back at the thread, if I really want to know.

But I don't use these platforms to converse, even though I will happily make a reply to an existing thread. They are both too fast and too slow to be conversational. I use comment threads as a writing prompt instead, and by ignoring external feedback I don't experience pain from them, even though some of the time this might result in someone asking me something and never hearing a reply. If my idea is good, someone copies it and I see it in a later thread.

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