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Comment by 0des | Hacker News Reader

Can any of the downvoters on this comment enlighten me about what they are seeing in this comment that those like myself don't see? It seemed like an otherwise normal comment, it just contradicts what some of the rest of us might think. That's not something that is wrong or worthy of being silenced.

Can we give this person another chance and maybe, in the spirit of the weekend, allow a contradictory opinion to appear in this discussion?

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HN downvotes are not different from any other social media platform. It doesn't matter what the rules says, people will downvote things they disagree and that's it. It always comes to this and I personally don't see how it could be any different, even if I myself don't do it

I find that more often than not, addressing it the way I just did brings the comment back into discussion rather than just brushing it aside. No need for leveraging rules that may or may not be followed, sometimes an impartial and rational third party inquiring buys enough 'hang time' for an otherwise okay comment to reach more people before it is returned to the gallows.

If I may, for a moment: filter bubbles are a useful but also dangerous thing, and if we allow ourselves to silence small irritances eventually, like with opiate dependency, we will find ourselves in the situation where the smallest pains are now grave and world-ending issues that stop everything and must be addressed/stopped immediately. I often disagree with the downvoted comments as well, however still upvote and vouch when they're rational yet contradictory.

Two sided discourse is one of the most important things to me, and in a way I think that we are losing the ability to disagree with each other, and that is a suboptimal outcome of our heightened ability to filter our data streams to weed out opinions we don't like. It's not enough for some people to disagree now, you must pursue the dissenter until you've destroyed their will to continue.

Surely it does not need to be spelled out how this can result in a chilling effect of outside thought and rational debate.

I find that more often than not, addressing it the way I just did brings the comment back into discussion

It doesn't, it just starts a pointless offtopic meta discussion. The forum guidelines explicitly ask you not to do that because it's boring. The votes, on average, tend to sort themselves out without such 'interventions'.

Forgive me for challenging you, but if the rules for downvotes are not applied evenly, where is the bar for which other rules must be applied evenly? It is saturday, and presumably with the exception of Dang and a few others, none of us are 'on the clock' so to speak when we are here, despite what our procrastinations during the week may indicate. If a topic on the front page list is boring, you pass it up, and all is right with the world. Why is this different with comments? (this is a rhetorical question, but I'll receive the response if you'd like to add one)

Because the goal of the site is things of intellectual curiosity and repetitive things are not that. Repeated stories are usually duped off the front page and meta about votes is far, far more repetitive than the occasional story dupe or story that's not interesting to some person or another. It would absolutely eat the place alive. If you're interested, though, there is years upon years of moderator and user commentary on this:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Just a friendly observation from a third party that this particular thread has in fact gone meta about HN, commenter behavior, and the site rules. Which are pretty clear.

I wonder if it may be the case that these rules have good reason to exist, and if so, then the discussion you are looking for seems to have happened at least once before, a long time ago.

If the point keeps coming up, perhaps it needs to be addressed rather than being modded into oblivion.

It has been addressed many times and there doesn't seem to be an obvious way of further addressing it beside doing exactly what the receipts-for-downvotes people want. Neither the mods nor most HN users want that, though and the arguments against it remain compelling.

The only rule regarding downvoting is to not complain about being downvoted. Aside from that, everything is fair game, including downvoting for disagreement.

> The forum guidelines explicitly ask you not to do that because it's boring.

Is it not possible that the "forum guidelines" are wrong?

Downvoting should cost something. Half a point, say. Or you only get a limited number of downvotes per week. Something.

Also, you should be required to give an actual reason other than "I disagree".

I know that's not what "the rules" say. "The rules" are wrong.

Indeed. I don't actually agree with the original commenter.

But that doesn't mean I want to shut him or her up.

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