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Comment by completelylegit | Hacker News Reader

If foreign governments can have a discernible effect on America because of a dislike button - removing it wouldn’t make a difference.

Removing the ability to _comment_ would be something different…

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I agree, Biden is regularly downvoted heavily. I would think primarily by Americans.

I would guess primarily by Right-wing Americans, the very Left-wing americans I know don't love him but wouldn't down vote him regularly.

The very left-wing Americans I know hated Trump a lot more than they love Biden. They have no particular love for Biden because Biden is not very left-wing at all. Biden comes from the old neoliberal contingent of the DNC, not the new lefty progressive camp. Biden is no Bernie or AOC and only has lukewarm support from very-left people, in my experience.

I think it does make a difference. Its a small one, but one that hits home. After all, when you see those videos online of the Biden admin with 1000s of dislikes...don't you feel that there is a segment of people out there that don't go along with the cultural zeitgeist of the internet? That maybe left-wing opinions (although dominant on the internet) may have some push back in the real world? When you lose that ability to voice opposition you get something not exactly dystopian but something marching closer to it.

I don't, and I think the strongest argument against the dislike counter is that it encourages people to. Dislike counts aren't an accurate metric of what people "out there" think because they're heavily dependent on who ends up seeing the video - it's easy for a video to have lots of dislikes even though it expresses popular views, or few dislikes even though it expresses unpopular views.

I definitely agree with this. If you go to any video right now that even mentions vaccines you can look at the comments of people talking about how evil Pfizer and Moderna are, and it dominates the entire comment section. I'm reasonably certain that a lot of these people are looking for vaccine videos just to shit on them in the comments and downvote them.

Not to mention, regardless what most people think or ones self thinks, I didn't think, or didn't like, much of the most important information and concepts that have ever been told to me.

It's fine to filter entertainment by taste and preference, but having news of the world treated exactly the same way is a problem. It's not only not a good idea, it's literally not sane.

How do you figure left-wing opinions are dominant on the internet?

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