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Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

Another place where the independent- and conventional-minded are thrown together is in successful startups. The founders and early employees are almost always independent-minded; otherwise the startup wouldn't be successful. But conventional-minded people greatly outnumber independent-minded ones, so as the company grows, the original spirit of independent-mindedness is inevitably diluted. This causes all kinds of problems besides the obvious one that the company starts to suck

I can think of no better example of this than Hacker News.

Years ago, independent-minded people came together for the liveliest "out of the box" discussions on the internet.

Eventually those people started to get shouted down until sadly, many of them left.

I wish I knew what to do about that. I imagine people way smarter than me have been struggling with this for some time.

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4chan handles this perfectly, but it comes with a general unpoliteness and freedom that most people don't like. However, those aspects of it are exactly what keeps the community fresh and constantly re-inventing itself, because you need cultural artifacts (memes, ways of interacting, etc) to be generated that oppose whatever the prevailing narrative is, and those are harder to be generated if everyone has to be polite all the time.

So the solution is fairly simple: remove upvotes so the conventionally-minded can't decide on what's being discussed, and don't moderate based on politeness, but on subject. 4chan has lots of moderation, but it's mostly focused around which board the discussion should go in, i.e. if you want to talk politics go to the politics board, don't do it in the video games one or your thread will be deleted. This is obviously a solution that doesn't work for most people, but that's the price you have to pay if you want actual independent-mindedness in a community.

An underappreciated part of 4chan's genius is the bump mechanism, which means that if something gets a lot of replies it gets bumped to frontpage again and again - and of course the posts that get a lot of replies are exactly the ones that go against the grain of the forum, that people try to refute.

Subreddits seem to somewhat solve this by spinning off once they hit that level of dilution (low effort content, memes, repeated questions). The 'serious' members will create a new subreddit (i.e. /r/movies > /r/TrueFilm) in order to shake off the casual members and return the discussion to its roots.

It's not perfect, but the subreddit design has definitely given Reddit more longevity since you can rotate your memberships and only join subreddits with higher effort content. Yes, the default subreddits are filled with the same memes every post, but just unsubscribe from those and curate your feed.

Not a solution for HN, however.

It also allows, almost encourages, to people to find echo chambers of very like-minded people. Each subreddit has it's own version of conventional-mindedness, and is resistant to anyone saying anything outside those boundaries.

Okay, but how do you have a lively discussion but also have nobody’s ideas getting shouted down? Would a lively discussion involve everyone agreeing with one another?

Edit: people are apparently not getting my central point here: it might be that, if you’re a conformist, you see a whole bunch of people nodding and saying roughly the same things and think, “this is a lively discussion!” But then see people disagreeing with you and think, “what happened to this once lively community?”

But, it could also be that we’re talking about something else. But the parent post is too vague for me to tell. I sense a more concrete suggestion coming on? Maybe related to the power of downvotes to silence dissent?

shoutedDown != disagreed

Explain. In what way?

Edit: I tried to just post that I think I understand where you’re coming from: people disagreeing but without giving actual reasons. Which is toxic. And guess what: I got “you’re posting too fast”. Thanks for enabling real discussions by nonconformists, hacker news!

Somewhere between DH3 and DH4 here: http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html

If you’re the one with the unpopular opinion, even if it is correct, then you will always find yourself being the one “shouted down”. But if you never find yourself shouted down, perhaps you are less nonconformist than you think?

You can’t be both nonconformist and also never shouted down. It’s a contradiction.

The reddit trap. Upvotes are supposed to be given for a good reply, even if it's against your opinion, not a reply that you happen to agree with. Same with downvotes.

Never happens, thus censorious fence sittery.

Good insight! I have probably been guilty of this same behavior.

But the upvotes/downvotes system kind of encourages this behavior. I’m trying to think of a better system but it’s a hard problem..

Make a community hard to use for the conventional-minded.

Dark patterns, but for user selection.

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