I'd say this forum is exactly this. How often have I self censored because I just don't want the downvotes?
I know that the people who disagree with me outnumber those that agree, but the way that the upvotes bounce up and down tells me there are more people out there that agree with me than I would have assumed.
(Plus I think I've only made it down to -4 once or twice)
Btw, for anyone who has trouble reading a faded comment, you can click on its timestamp to go to its page and the text should be readable.
What I have learned from struggling a lot with issues normal people don't face (at least going by majority) is that we are all toxic to each other. Some things are more visible and easily understandable for others while many aren't. It may feel pretty shitty for a disabled person inside a room of normal people complaining about very trivial things and calling for others to become disabled as a joke. Some autism jokes may actually invoke sad memories for others. But there are groups of young people who do all those and don't think it is toxic. Joking about depression is another. There are many examples where line of toxicity isn't so visible for a specific majority.
People have difficulty imagining the scale of time and when that difficulty helps them form a tribalistic decision to justify their own biases, it's much more easier to do that than fight against the urge.
The rise of short attention span only means people are much less empathetic than they seem to think they are by social media.
It's only my opinion but an empathetic person will look beyond that this person has some horrible political opinions and I want to run a witch hunt. A tweet out of 20k tweets in isolation doesn't say much about the person especially if it's old. They might be having a bad day, may want attention and said something controversial to get it. Maybe they do have medical problems (I know I do, I am on meds and my behavior changes a lot). And even if that person is officially shitty, I don't see why would you try to burn their house. It's ok to inform others but what's the point of attacking someone that they think "nobody" cares about them?
If nobody cares about improving those people, then they might as well become too extreme in their opinion. If nobody wants to hear them, they might as well be racist. We all strive for connection and the reason why we don't want discrimination to exist is we don't want to lose our ability to interact with people we care about. If all racists can get are other racist people or no one, why would they change?
Side note, most if not all outrage on social media (esp twitter and youtube) seems to be created by sufficiently motivated individuals. It's as obvious as a bright sky. So I wonder if you can live sharing your opinions while not getting bad side on one of those twitter mob groups.
My problem with downvotes isn't the effect on my score. It's the fact that the font becomes paler. Dissenting opinions are singled out in a way that makes them look bad/wrong. I also don't like how the UX doesn't represent the distribution. A post with no votes will look like a post with 50 upvotes and 50 downvotes.
I am fine with downvotes, and with some UX mechanism to let people know that a post is being downvoted. But I think the current UX engenders groupthink.
That seems much worse. As well as not being transparent at all.
What is worse, it is an entirely silent way of silencing dissent. I would love to experiment with the other end of the spectrum: not only should the number of downvotes be visible, downvoting someone should also require a reason to be given, in the form of a post. And it should be possible to downvote those reasons too, with the algorithm adjusting the original downvote's weight based on the score of the downvote reason.
And I wouldn't say the forum is "exactly this" unless you're saying that downvotes are on par with getting "fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or killed."
I often find myself thinking that we either need to create a healthier mechanism for finer grained social consequences at a mass scale, or accept that the future belongs to sociopaths and cancel culture.
There is a chilling effect happening, and people need to be able to make unpopular arguments -- again, in good faith.
Also quite amusing what someone will take time out of their day to down vote sometimes.
He has to regularly see multiple sides of the site. HN is pretty diverse depending on what you click and as such, I do think he is less biased in some ways we are and more biased in others as he work as a mod for hn.
A reply comments on how HN is somewhat similar. People censoring themselves due to fear of being downvoted. I pointed out that IMO downvotes are a very mild sanction and truly, people don't need to censor themselves on HN, but the true cost would come if everyone had to comment with their real names.
Sorry it wasn't groundbreaking enough for you.
Maybe now it's still okay, but in ten years, who knows, I may be "cancelled".
Not that it hasn't already happened to others.