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Comment by kahnjw | Hacker News Reader

Not sure why this is getting voted down, this is absolutely the case. Either you kill exponential growth via isolation/inoculation or damn near everyone gets sick in an exponential explosion and the healthcare system is overrun. This is simple statistics.

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I can't figure voting out on this site anymore. It used to work a lot like other spots, with primarily upvotes given to express general agreement or reward insight, and downvotes reserved for comments that got something factually incorrect. Now I'm seeing about a 50/50 split with downvotes, and it generally doesn't correlate in any meaningful way with either correctness or the status of the debate. It's routine to see discussions with reasonable participation on both sides gets a wildly asymmetric split in votes, with half of them grayed out entirely. And it kinda sucks.

In this particular case here in this topic: there's a voting (but seemingly not commenting) population that just really wants COVID-19 to be a flop. I'd be tempted to say that's a political position, but in fact politicians have largely unified on this (finally). Maybe it's a counterculture or conspiracy thing.

No one should be surprised. This site, and its moderation, has (possibly even unintentionally) favored a certain political ideology for years. I and others stopped maintaining accounts over it. Any economic discussion is inevitably political, but strangely only certain types of comments and discussions get slaughtered by public opinion or admonished by moderators. (Easy to see in each passing day as it becomes obvious that direct relief / UBI are necessary and the libertarians of this site realize that caring for fellow human beings might benefit them too!)

I mean in the last week, multiple legit stories have been flagged off the home page about Coronavirus. Go back and look at the comments on the story that hit the frontpage about Trump trying to buy exclusive rights to a vaccine... A story that was ultimately confirmed as true. But yet it was flagged off the frontpage by Trump supporters that denounced it as "fake news" of course, as if he doesn't regularly do things that would be unbelievable without video/audio evidence.

Meanwhile, any comment, like yours, that mention the BLEAK REALITY THAT THIS IS GOING TO LAST MORE THAN 3 WEEKS is getting downvoted. Systematically. As if downvoting you changes basic fucking maths.

Frankly, I think it's massive cases of denial. I think people are just starting to get an image of how bad this is going to be and how fucked our social structure is about to be. Especially if this drags on for many months (like those of us paying attention understand is likely).

HN has just generally been particularly insufferable the last week and a half, but at least the really obnoxious deniers have mostly ... stopped.

People always project whatever ideology they disagree with onto the moderators. C'est le job. Plenty of accusations go the other way—randomish sample:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22256458

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20438487

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032682

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15307915

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21588105

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21325122

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15546533

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=BetterThanSlave

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16397133

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19912334

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20742578

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21803541

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21907232

(sorry...hard to stop)

People also chronically overinterpret whatever they see on HN that they don't like—again, myriads of comments make the opposite generalization to yours. Randomness plus cognitive bias equals narrative.

Yet it wasn't like this in the past. And while I won't make the same accusations I do think it would be good for you guys to look at the culture that gets encouraged here. There is a viciousness to the voting here and an intolerance of opinion that just doesn't match the seemingly sophisticated comments.

You seem to be talking about voting patterns while I'm talking about cognitive biases leading to bogus generalizations. Those seem like two distinct "it"s.

As for voting patterns, I'm not sure I agree. For example, it's not true that downvotes used to be reserved for something factually incorrect. The voting mechanisms are subject to the same psychology as they always were.

Your comments often argue in edgy ways that are not exactly in keeping with the spirit of this site. From my perspective that's more likely why they're getting downvotes. I took a quick look and your comments that I saw which were upvoted don't seem to have this quality. Usually, when people complain about downvotes, there's something in their comments that they're not aware of, but which is apparent to readers. Of course there are also downvotes simply because of disagreement, but all comments get those, and they usually get fixed by corrective upvotes if there's nothing else in the comment that has a downvoteable quality.

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