Don’t like someone OR their comment? Just do your part with three other people and it’ll be faded, once it’s faded other people will join in hiding the bad man who said the bad thing - and gone!
No more contrarian opinion, we protected other people! Everyone agrees now. How wonderful.
I agree, downvote-based discussions invariably lead to echo chambers / monocultures. See the dumpster fire that are reddit comments.
At least on old-time forums there was no such bullshit (except post count :)).
Anyway, a few years ago I thought I could speed up the tagging process by pulling tags from Last FM and filtering out the shite by only including tags that matched an instrument name or mood. Luckily I backed up before running the script on my whole collection. The data was absolute garbage.
It didn't work perfectly (obviously the site is still highly opinionated in favor of certain things, like Linux and free software), but it also wasn't the smooth-brained hivemind that Reddit comments sections are. I can't think of another site that's even tried to come up with a better moderation system than simple up/down votes. At best, there are some behind-the-scenes algorithms that decide how exactly to prioritize comments based on the voting, but that's derived from popularity as well. An immeasurable side effect of this is that many heterodox comments simply aren't posted at all since people know they're going to be downvoted to oblivion anyway.
Reddit lost its way when they started heavily moderating or banning entire subs that didn't fit with their woke US-centric world view, while rape porn was "fine". I closed my account a while back and stopped visiting the site, but unfortunately, there are so many organisations and FOSS projects that use it in an official capacity that it's unavoidable.
A person who gives 100 downvotes per month will have his downvotes count 1/20th as those of a person who downvotes 5 times per month. An incenctive to be really judicious in handing out downvotes and not simply using them to drown out minority opinions.
Content would get moderated but you could still read messages. Even the ones that went against the dogma.
Not at HN, anti-dogma posts get downvoted into oblivion or flagged if they are bad enough. I recently posted a counter-opinion on burnout and was downvoted pretty badly. I didn't flame, and tried to articulate my point well.
HN is composed of the exact microcosm of people who have ruined the internet. It's just an echo chamber where counter-points are nuked. No different than facebook, or anything else. At least /. made you think about using your modpoints to downvote. Now it's free - and for many very pathetic people downvoting is a source of dopamine. It's far easier to drive-by-downvote without having to even articulate a reply as to why. Comparing this to the old BBSes and forums, you at least got a moderator note (or a VERY disparaging note from a user) in your PMs about why you're being moderated. It is wildly frustrating to type something well thought out and be downvoted into oblivion because your stance isn't en-vogue.