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Comment by blantonl | Hacker News Reader

I stand by what I posted. I'm allowed to be authoritative as I want in my opinions and what I deem to be a personal analysis of what is a subjective issue. If you aren't in agreement with my assertions, you are free to click the down arrow to the left of the post.

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Please don't respond with this sort of indignation even when the feeling is justified. It takes the discussion way off topic and encourages worse from others.

Absolutely. I just mentally add “in my opinion” to everything I read and its liberating; I think way few people do it. More people should see the good wife.

People (myself included) read these comments like a debugger — “How can that be?! I triple checked my ‘brain base’... that’s wrong, must fix”

Although I usually ignore responses like in the GP, I like what you wrote here. It implicitly names the unfair rhetorical attack (effectively the kind of strawman that treats you as if you spoke authoritatively, when you were clearly giving your opinion). But yeah, with the right audience you don't have to respond at all, we'll know wassup.

But he did speak authoritatively, "Facebook decided..."

Facebook didn't decide anything as far as we know, he's presenting his opinions as facts, they aren't.

You're allowed to be anything you want. It's a free country. But 2c worth of advice - representing speculative things as high-confidence erodes your credibility. Unless you have some insight or information that everyone else here doesn't, you're really just full of it.

"Facebook decided they don't want to be a part of this type of content distribution" - That is not stated as an implied opinion, it is stated as a fact with absolutely nothing to back it up. Certainly Facebook is just as filled with this kind of low-quality content today as it was yesterday or three months ago. There is just nothing to support your speculation that this is part of some movement by Facebook to improve quality of content.

> representing speculative things as high-confidence erodes your credibility

I wish you were right, but I actually think most of the time the exact opposite is true: appearing highly-confident about speculative things makes someone seem more credible, rather than less.

Right up until something you say gets proven to be wrong.

The higher confidence you presented your wrong statement, the higher the hit to your credibility will be.

I very much want this to be true but it seems you’ll do fine if you can confidently spew off another explanation.

https://religiondispatches.org/a-year-after-the-non-apocalyp...

You could become the leader of the free world, even.

I thought the down arrow was supposed to be used to indicate that a post is of low quality or that it doesn't conform to guidelines, not to express disagreement; and that disagreement was meant to be expressed by posting arguments

Everyone votes by their own rules. There's no official guidelines on how to use the voting buttons.

Your comment inspired me to submit https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25636267

It seems more common these days to use it on HN to express disagreement. That wasn't the case years ago.

I suspect it has to do with the reddit / youtube generation becoming adults. Polite disagreement seems to be on the way out.

That theory makes sense, though it's unfortunate, IMHO. Personally, I'd prefer for comments to rank higher based on quality (irrespective of which way they lean) than hivemind inclinations. Seek well-roundedness and all that.

If I suspect something is flamebait (ie, responses are not discussion I think belongs on HN as it's redundant/religious/reactive) and the content's value doesn't exceed that flamebait characteristic, I'll downvote.

ie, I downvote things that I feel have an aggregate S/N degradation multiplier.

I kinda miss /.'s moderation qualifiers.

Polite disagreement will often result in downvotes for oneself though. I think this is the problem?

With all due respect, as someone who has been participating in online communities since the days of FidoNet, I don't think people have really changed. There's just more people, which itself drives up the opportunity for disagreement.

And some of the most disagreeable people on my social media are old farts, too :)

That's not actually what the down arrow is for.

Citation please.

> Downvoting should not be used for simple disagreement.

Used to be part of the guidelines. Seems as though they've removed it.

You are misinforming the HN audience by making it sound like you know why FB took their action. In a way you are distributing crap content here.

That’s not what the down arrow is for. This is what I’m getting at.

Instead of treating the comment section as a dumping ground for your purely speculative opinions masquerading as authoritative takes, and pushing the burden of nuance onto readers by asking them to downvote if they disagree, I think one should clearly state their opinions in an intellectually honest way. Then there is no need for downvoting if others disagree.

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