Ask HN: What kind of a downvoter are you? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What kind of a downvoter are you?

There are many reasons why people downvote comments/posts in any community - be it HN, Reddit, Facebook, etc. I would be thankful if you could explain your reasoning for downvoting the comments when you choose to do so.

For example, I'll sometimes see a massively downvoted comment that's constructive and beautifully written, but it carries an opinion that is not currently popular for whatever reason.

I believe that downvoting someone just because you disagree with them is terrible for a discussion network like HN. Moreover, I would say that I learned the most from the comments that I disagreed with - on all levels, politically, technologically, personally.

I will downvote a comment if it's not constructive, only written to be provocative, etc. It doesn't matter if I agree with the author's opinion or not. If someone puts in the effort to explain their opinion politely and constructively, my thinking is that it's positive for all the people in the community.

So, what kind of a downvoter are you? What are some of your reasons for downvoting a comment?

View on HN

Chaotic Neutral!

More seriously, I almost never downvote, when I do, it's mostly if it's outright offensive, either literally or intellectually, that is, not an argument that I disagree with as such, but one that I find offensively uninformed, self-deceptive or is nothing but value-signalling. That can include arguments that align with my own opinion [1].

1. Contrived example: I may find a proposed law a bad idea because it limits freedom in socity. If someone else agreed that it was a bad idea, but argued it was because the law would be friendly to "some ethnic minority they dislike". I'd still downvote them for being idiots, (to be fair, it'd probably also make me reconsider my own position).

This is the same thing I try to do. I'm very bad at flagging/downvoting as much as I should. Most days I'll read 3,000 comments and not downvote a single one. I want to religiously downvote and flag every comment which breaks HN guidelines. Especially jokes which don't add context/perspective.

examples of actual comments in the past 24 hours that I wish I had downvoted:

> 2022 will finally be the year of Linux on the desktop! /s

> So... fuzzy logic. Everything old is new again! Again!

> piety contests have consequences

> Top level commend: "in the fullness of time JAX might prove to be more important than either. don't give people fish, teach them how to catch fish and all that..."

> wtf I love crypto now

I'm looking for a more specific example but nearly every day I see an interesting article where there's one long comment chain which is just "textual memes", sort of a Markov-chain of pop culture references for internet nerds. There's no extractable commentary or perspective, but rather the purpose of the comments were for the commenters to have "participated" in their group activity. (Often it's a type of "Hello there, general Kenobi" call-and-response chain)

Some pithy-one liners hold great insight. That's fairly rare but it does happen. Its certainly possible to creatively utilize a one-word reference to a larger topic to contextualize the discussion in a surprising way. But rehashing a cluster of xkcd comics as a form of commentary, for the 10-millionth time, seems to more often just lead to a "circle jerk" of comments. Its easy to ignore, but I fear that by not aggressively downvoting zero-value comments, we abdicate our responsibility as HN's "immune system"[0]. That attracts and grows more culture of low-value comments on HN.

I would love if HN's collective moderation grew to be much stricter than it is now. To be clear - I don't want this to be applied to unpopular views that are constructively written. I just want us to remove low-effort drivel and reflexive (non)-responses.

Also many of my own comments fail my own standards when I review them 24 hours later. I would greatly appreciate it if HN could give me quicker feedback when I post low-value comments, so that I may better raise my quality floor.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7590569

I can't downvote with this account yet, but with past accounts I downvote if:

- the comment contains information that I know is either factually incorrect, or

- is making bad assumptions.

I have upvoted comments I disagree with in the past because they were well-reasoned, good, thought-provoking comments.

I downvote things which are:

- misleading or in bad-faith (straw man arguments, cherry-picking to the point of absurdity)

- obviously designed to cause offence or provocation

- which don't add to conversation ("this", "yeah", "same", etc)

- unconstructively dismissive

If it's something I disagree with but it's a good-faith argument and well written, I just move on.

I know some downvote jokes/puns, but I don't mind them in moderation. I think one needs to read the room before making joke comments though.

I am guilty of sometimes wording my arguments especially to provoke (and probably offend the faint of heart) when I feel there is obvious group-think going on, often, it is when the mob has conjured up motive or intent for which there is no proof.

But I understand what you mean if you mean provoke in the sense that trolls do it, baiting for a flamewar, etc.

The worst is users with the ability to flag content.

I have dead comments turned on and see a lot of well-made thought provoking comments that that are flagged because they are contrary to the popular narrative.

On the other hand there are a lot of bad comments that deserve to be flagged so it's a double-edged sword.

I've resurrected quite a few of these; note that with flagging rights comes also the "vouch" button to keep the discourse more balanced.

Would be interested to learn the proportion of flagged:vouched comments.

When I had the Karma to do it I would too lol.

The problem is you have to have dead comments turned on to vouch, but the ability to flag comments is default with enough karma.

I didn't even know there were so many decent flagged comments until I turned on dead.

I think it would be cool to have a mechanism where if someone's flagged comments get vouched for so many times they lose their ability to flag for a period of time.

I've noticed that probably six months ago, vouching a comment would immediately return it to a live state ~90% of the time. Presumably because as soon as it hits the dead state it no longer gets flagged, so one is all that's needed to put it back over the threshold. Recently, my vouches have revived comments 0% of the time. I'm not sure if the algorithm or UI changed, or if I was simply using the feature too much for someone's liking and they disabled it for me on the back end?

I've come across many, many helpful and thoughtful comments that I can't revive simply because this thing that should work has stopped even though I have about 30x the karma needed for it.

I've noticed exactly the same change. My first guess would be that reviving a dead article/comment now requires more than one user to vouch for it.

How much karma is needed before flag and vouch are available?

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

I just went to reply to you that it doesn’t mention comment flagging. But then I realized the flag button is apparently only there while typing a reply.

Careful - if the mods disagree with your vouching decisions you can lose vouching privileges.

I only downvote when a comment checks all of the following boxes for me:

* It has little to no content relating to the conversation.

* It is also unnecessarily provocative.

Basically if it looks like a troll, walks like a troll, and acts like a troll it get's the downvote.

Same here. Conversely, I upvote when a comment is especially interesting or informative.

I try to avoid both upvoting and downvoting based only on whether I agree or disagree with the comment, though I can’t guarantee that I have stuck to this policy rigorously.

Interesting. Here, I do that but also upvote based on someone being the opposite of a troll: I will sometimes upvote comments that aren't super informative if they contribute to a general tone/culture of supporting discussion. (Like apologies or 'I was wrong' type comments; I think it's good if people can admit mistakes so I upvote to try to encourage this.)

FWIW, Paul Graham has commented that using up/down arrows for agreement/disagreement is fine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171.

At the end of the day I think everyone just upvotes comments they like, and downvotes comments they dislike, people just have different reactions to things that impact what "dislike" means to them.

Downvoting because you disagree can't possibly be conducive for quality discussions? I upvote downvoted comments even if I disagree with them. It just needs to be a comment in good faith. I also upvote comments for bookmarking purposes, things that I might come back to someday but probably not.

You are depicting humans as agents which respond to emotion and, at most, "rationalize" instead of vetting. That is gratuitous, defeatist and a generalization. That some people are capable of some degree of openness, and also of intellectual integrity, should hopefully be a given experience.

A hefty part of education and social interaction should bring (at least some) abilities in emotion control, intellectual integrity, and, first of all, reflection.

- adds nothing

- just expresses personal preference

- bad assumptions

- bad argument

- factually incorrect

- too unclear

- inflammatory or dismissive

- probably other stuff

> I believe that downvoting someone just because you disagree with them is terrible for a discussion network

Sure but I think it is a bit naive and futile to expect otherwise. People are going to try to hide and punish the spreading of opinions that they don't want people to have. Consider especially that there are opinions that people consider against their interests for people to hold, thus there is an even stronger incentive for them to suppress them and doing so would be entirely rational.

On HN, I rarely downvote. I only downvote when it's blatant spam, or out of topic, or provocative.

But on Reddit, I now tend to downvote things I dislike. I originally acted like on HN, but I noticed that _everyone_ else is downvoting because 'they don't like it', so I got on it too.

If you see spam, downvote it, but don't stop there. Flag it.

True! I do it. The question was explicitly about downvote so I left that part out :)

I have been here for many years and cannot downvote, so if I disagree with something I have to make a comment disagreeing, which usually results in my comment getting downvoted so I never get any karma. Which is good, because poverty is cleansing.

Glad to answer! My standard on voting is, "Does this improve the discussion?" How do you improve the discussion?

- Summaries of key dynamics/context for the discussion.

- Substantively criticizing other's points.

- References to related materials about the topic in different context and how they're relevant.

How do you worsen the discussion? The opposite of that, plus:

- Misrepresenting arguments or misapplying a citation.

- Replying only to the weakest, easiest version of a point. [1]

- Low-effort in-jokes. ("Hey, maybe they could use a Beowulf cluster for this!" "The mitochondria? Like, the powerhouse of the cell?" Any reference to the IT crowd emergency number.)

Generally speaking, my voting will correlate with whether I agree with a comment. But, two big exceptions:

- If I disagree with the conclusion, but it makes a good case for it that I think merits a response, I'll upvote.

- If I agree with the points, it's done in a trollish way that hinders substantive discussion of the key argument, I downvote. There was one interesting case (I'll try to find it) where the commenter made a great point, and even made a great analogy to one kind of taxation ... but the point didn't need the analogy, and said analogy (predictably) triggered a bunch of commenters to defend their sacred taxation cow at all costs even if they would have otherwise agreed with the main point.

[1] including nitpicking, unless the comment indicates it's doing so, i.e. just fixing a technical inaccuracy unrelated to the core point

I'm not cynical, but I kind of gave up on people who don't behave on the internet or are blatantly stupid. Sometimes this feels like I gave up on the internet as a whole, but I try to accept that it won't change anything whether I care or not. Things will go their way no matter if I fight it or not. So I try to ignore it. But what I want to do, is, I want to upvote more. I want to encourage people to be open with their thoughts and knowledge and create output that I think benefits more people and puts us on the right direction.

Long story short: I try to focus on what has value and encourage that behavior with upvotes and further comments.

PS: What's the required karma to downvote? I'm currently not in the position to be able to downvote anyway ^^

Edit: (1) "I'm not cynical, but ..." Well, not a good start... I try not to be, maybe I am. But I don't want to be. (2) Karma required to downvote is 500 according to another commenter

If I find it disagreeable enough. If someone makes a bad joke. I flag content when it’s trolling or goes into ism categories.

I flag stories when the headline doesn’t match the content or the content piece itself is garbage.

I’m liberal with downvotes. I’ll go through some threads and only downvote - nothing being worthy of an upvote.

I get I’m different than some here who think the downvote is holy and should only be used on the most sinful but I prefer a liberal amount of course correction over even slight sins. No sense in trying to turn a boat that is already flipped.

I also use it to manipulate threads where I want a certain comment to be at the top. I’ll downvote one that I’m not particularly fond of and then upvote those I find more relevant - purely with the goal to get a certain narrative going.

I think many people here do the same, tbh. This might make me sound like a prolific downvoter but I don’t feel like I am. Many threads get no votes at all from me and I read quite a few…

I imagine you'll get a higher percentage of respondants from the group that downvotes for "good reasons", than you will from the group that downvotes for "bad reasons" as they are probably less willing to publically admit it. So I doubt the responses in this thread will be that representative overall.

I will downvote what I think of as "brick-headedness". By this, I mean someone who will argue until the reply indentation hits the right side of the screen, but absolutely will not admit or accept any validity whatsoever to the other side's criticism.

I'd even go so far as to say, if you're not going to listen, don't try to talk (here). HN isn't for you to prove that you're right against all comers. That's a really low-quality conversation.

Now, you can have someone who is in fact completely in the right, and it can take quite a few posts to demonstrate why. (Been on the receiving end, most recently in nuclear physics.) But you can kind of tell the difference between "listening to understand" and "listening only to argue back".

When a post lowers the quality of the debate.

> I believe that downvoting someone just because you disagree with them is terrible for a discussion network like HN

Yes: that would be unintellectual. If this is for debate, debate it should be. (Otherwise it would be "polling", not debating.)

Some noted that "If one can upvote to express agreement, then one could downvote to express disagreement". This position fails to see the asymmetry in rational discourse: you may not need further arguments to support the weight of an expressed position, but you do, in general, need arguments to instead oppose it.

(Otherwise, it's Monty Python's Argument Sketch - "Yes it is", "No it isn't"...)

One rule about voting: Don't shit where you eat. In other words, don't downvote comments / commenters you are also arguing with.

I try (but probably fail often) to downvote only on fact or form, not opinion.

I think some people are terribly thin skinned when it comes to downvoting.

I tend to agree.

The only time I get really annoyed for being downvoted is after presenting a provable factual statement, which riles up a fanboi of some sorts..

That said, I don't think I ever complained about a downvote. It's not worth it, detracts from the discussion flow and is almost always self-correcting by upvotes from others.

I consistently downvote posts talking about voting. I have downvoted what I thought was great posts bcs they ended with a "inb4 incoming downvotes lolz".

same. especially the ones that try to go for "and if I get downvoted it's just proof I'm right"... because it basically never is.

The same as described in OP. Btw, it is not my personal trait, I just know how it supposed to be here and how it makes HN HN. Maybe it’s in the rules/faq, visited it pretty long ago.

Edit: I think that the common idea of downvoting on HN is that it’s not your own opinion on a post content, but actually a public moderation mechanism allowing you to decide if that comment fits HN, not you, without flagging it to a moderator.

It depends on the community.

I don't downvote on Reddit. The way the voting system is implemented makes it functionally worthless and I don't see the point. I also barely upvote; I upvote comments that I really like/agree with/want to encourage if they're low scoring. Like comments sharing on a PTSD subreddit; I'll upvote if those are low to encourage people to speak/let them know the lurkers support them in email.

Can't DV on HN with this account, but back in the Dark Ages, I only downvoted here if the comment was either a.) assuming bad faith/attacking a strawman or b.) pulling in what I recognize as a narrative and not leaving space for it to be questioned. (So Twitter level content).

For FB I guess the 'downvote' would be the angry button, but I don't think that's a good comparison, given it is also used for being infuriated on behalf of the comment maker instead of AT them.

Though that comparison now makes me want to compare downvoting behavior to car horns: Both are limited communication devices meant to display displeasure with the actions of a random stranger you might never encounter again...

I don't downvote really. I mostly browse popular feeds everywhere so downvotting something won't result in any use. Also if you really hate something that is also popular, downvotting that means you are actively fighting a losing battle.

I am pretty good at rants so I will go on a rant on the comment section instead. I like to vent to strangers and I think some people love a good rant to read.

Can I answer this differently?

I virtually always upvote comments, which I see downvoted for expressing an opinion, which is obviously presented in good faith. That's even then the case when I violently disagree with the opinion in question.

What's even worse than people downvoting a well reasoned opinion are downvotes for factual statements.

I almost cheer when a comment of mine gets a quick down vote. Nothing attracts upvotes faster than a grey comment that shouldn't be grey.

It's not only that. Usually - and provided that you comment in good faith and provide a well reasoned opinion - being downvoted is actually a badge of honor in a way.

And yes, it's usually self-correcting anyway.

There's a quote attributed to Peter Maurin: "We must make the kind of society where it is easier for people to be good."

I think, in the case of downvotes, it's easy for them to be used for reasons other than their intended purpose because they are the least time consuming way to express displeasure, and there is virtually no downside to using them for that purpose.

It would obviously add complexity to have a separate mechanism for voicing disagreement with an argument presented in good faith. But it might make it easier for people to use downvotes appropriately for cases where the person is not acting in good faith or violating the forum's rules.

If I could, I would downvote anything that does not increase the signal-to-noise ratio. In the last 1-2 years, there has been an upward trend in reddit-like comments like "Yes!", "That sucks", and smart-ass/low-quality oneliners that are supposed to be funny.

if only those comments could just disappear from HN.

I know sometimes on Reddit I would reply to people with something very short when all they’d been getting were lots of downvotes, or even some upvotes, but I felt they needed some support through actual human communication instead of just the blank emptiness of votes, and yet I didn’t have anything detailed to say.

Mostly either offensive or presumptive e.g. "anyone who uses .Net is stupid" or otherwise where the conclusion is much more dogmatic than the logic so it reads like arrogance.

I wouldn't downvote someone who said something like "Shouldn't we all make time to ensure our code is always secure" (even though this might not be realistic/true) whereas someone who said something like, "Anyone who doesn't make time to ensure their code is always secure deserves to go out of business" implies that it is always possible to secure all code; that people choose to not secure certain parts; and therefore they deserve to fail. I am more likely to downvote this.

I don't mind opinions though so if someone said "I always use PHP and it has always been fine", is no problem even though that's not my experience.

Downvotes on HN are basically random.

I've had well-written comments downvoted into oblivion in threads that also included another comment stating the exact same opinion slightly differently. I've had zingy one-liners upvoted to 100 or so. I've had discussions where the back and forth statements alternated between negative and positive karma.

I'm treating it as a study in human behavior around communications. So far my takeaways are:

- a zingy one-liner that agrees with the zeitgeist will be upvoted to the sky

- the same type of comment expressing a contrarian view will be buried

- timing matters: if you get a few downvotes early on, the downvote brigade will help ensure a continued slide

- downvoting to disagree is natural (meme theory and all that). What's interesting to me is how can one overcome the impulse to downvote and potentially seed a new idea in someone's brain.

> timing matters: if you get a few downvotes early on, the downvote brigade will help ensure a continued slide

I think the comment kind and timing matter together. If the comment was reasonable but contrary to popular views, it will usually attract early downvotes, but over time I’ve noticed the score will normalize as more measured people visit the story over the day.

You really nailed it. I agree 100%.

It still riles me, when well reasoned opinions are downvoted.

Edited to add: Your comment is a brilliant example and I really don't get why it's downvoted <shrug>

I was actually half expecting some downvotes and thought it would be a cute bit of post-irony to downvote this to near-background color.

I downvoted it because "a few outliers" does not remotely imply "100% random". Votes are pretty well correlated with comment quality, and being able to cite extreme exceptions is not a refutation of that.

You are right, it's not really random, but it can certainly feel that way.

I can throw the pedantry right back at you though: I didn't quote a percentage of randomness so I made a true statement. Some degree of randomness is present (if nothing else, it would be the percentage of readers having a bad day at that moment). So there :P

> I didn't quote a percentage of randomness

Ah, you're right, I blurred it with the comment that said they agree 100%.

>so I made a true statement.

No, you didn't, and it's not pedantry to say "don't dismiss a rating system because you can find the occasional outlier". That would be a big mistake, and merits being called out. Even speaking loosely, none of that justifies calling it "basically random".

The test of a discussion forum is whether good comments are generally pushed up (and vice versa) and how well that does compared to discussion forums in general. The occasional pathological case does not suddenly make it worthless or "basically random".

It's interesting that we had a back and forth discussion here. If we were talking in person, this kind of error correction would be natural (me: "it's random", you: "this is not what random is", me: "oh yeah, I'm using it in the colloquial sense, how silly of me, my main point...") but comments don't have that immediate feedback. At the same time they are not essays: one cannot spend as much time editing and forecast every small negative reaction.

Thank you for an interesting discussion!

That's not what happened. You're wrong in the most charitable, colloquial sense too, and that should have been clear from my previous reply. You didn't just "goof" or speak casually, you mischaracterized what the voting patterns look like, or, at the very least, you need to back up your view with more than "hey! Look at these weird cases!"

"Basically random" looks nothing like what we see on HN.

Ironic that your comment gets downvoted. The comments I see being downvoted usually are either offtopic, self-promotion, or ignorant.

An interesting thing about HN downvoting is that it makes the comment disappear (for you) immediately. So downvoting = "I don't want to see/hear this"

I sometimes reflexively downvote but when I see the comment collapse, it gives me pause and makes me think about my own motivations - do I really think that comment simply shouldn't appear for me, or do I just disagree with it? Even if I think it's ignorant or badly written, I still have to think twice.

In contrast, other platforms let you downvote and reply, which I think lets you try to have it both ways: I want to tell you what I think of your stupid comment, but I also don't want you to be part of the conversation. Maybe that's fundamentally wrong.

I agree with the other person who said people can be too think skinned about the whole business though.

This is yours-only collapse [-], not downvote. Downvoting is enabled at 500, afaik, I just upvoted you to 500 for you to see/test it :)

The mininum is 501 though :)

Wow, I had no idea, thanks!

Thank you for this. I was very confused about the behaviour poster described.

501 iirc

I very rarely downvote.

I think the downvote option is probably needed but it can be problematic - it carries different meanings with subtle differences:

- A way to signal disagreement with a comment.

- A means to flag a comment as clearly misleading or incorrect.

- A way of signalling a 'low value' comment (obviously subjective).

- A way for the downvoter to simply express his or her displeasure at what has been posted regardless how reasonable the comment is. (This probably happens more often than people care to admit it. It's subtly different than just disagreement.)

One might argue all the above examples are types of 'disagreement'.

An idea:

Clicking downvote adds the following line to the end of a comment: 3 readers disagree or 3 readers downvoted. Would this make readers pause before they hit the downvote button? (And is that a good or bad thing?)

> Clicking downvote adds the following line to the end of a comment: 3 readers disagree or 3 readers downvoted. Would this make readers pause before they hit the downvote button? (And is that a good or bad thing?)

I don't think that would work well; you'd need to add numbers of upvotes as well. There's a huge difference between a comment that 50 people hated and 0 people liked and a comment that 150 people hated and 100 liked. They're both '-50' but have different social contexts.

I do think some form of artificial difficulty might be a good idea though.

When I find myself downvoting I usually flag as well.

I do this rarely when someone is commenting in a way that’s going to drag a thread into a muddy, already-well-trodden non-sequitur.

New and more interesting ideas deserve as much of a chance as they can get.

If it's factually wrong, or missing the point. Or if it's just attacking the parent.

I try not to downvote opinions, even if they are blatantly stupid. On the other hand, disagreeing in a clever way will earn an upvote from me.

If someting is factually wrong I give the person the benefit of the doubt and assume they just don't know. In those situations rather than downvoting I usually just post a comment with a correction. I don't think understandable ignorance is personally worth my downvote. It's an opportunity to educate instead.

HN and Reddit (obviously depends on a subreddit) are drastically different communities than LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook.

I might downvote on HN or Reddit if something is spammy or blatantly doesn't bring any value to the conversation. I do that very rarely though.

Frequency wise I much more often go straight to reporting content for removal without getting into discussion with people that have more free time than me. While it still unfortunately takes time, I believe that if damaging (racist, abusive, calling for violence) content is left unattended the general amount of it will only multiply with time.

If a post centers on a logical fallacy, I'll downvote it. I see too much false dichotomy, like "if not x, then it must be y" where u, v, w, etc. are not even considered. What really aggravates me is when I point this out from a completely neutral standpoint and people treat me like I'm supporting one side or the other when I'm merely pointing out there are more than 2 sides!

I'll also downvote stuff that is off topic. I'm sure I downvote other things, but I'd say those two are the lion's share.

I downvote comments written in a flame war or Reddit-silly joke style.

I like to put down the nice-jolly-point-grabby-no-content ones and the long-treatise-on-why-someone-is-wrong-on-the-internet-wall-of-text-waste-of-space types of comments. I also like to upvote those which are voted down (but not dead) for cynicism. UX people who like to discuss the arrangement of letters in the title instead of the article itself get it the worst. I am pretty much the exact opposite of HN.

I am downvoting comments that are (subjectively) misleading, false or with bad intentions. Never for different opinions, I am actually upvoting any different opinion sustained by solid arguments.

This is only for HN, I am not active on social networks, I had enough.

I only downvote when the person's comment comes off as rude. Snark I can take, but rudeness, bombastic obtuseness, and just plain impoliteness will move me to downvote. The argument may have been supportive, but not with that attitude.

I downvote two things:

- Comments that seem to be trolls or low effort jokes.

- Such outlandish comments that I can't even bring myself to reply to, as I can see no timeline where value can be added in the conversation chain.

Otherwise, I make an effort to reply if I disagree.

I downvote root level comments that are unrelated to the content of the article they are responding to. You see a ton of this on posts about WFH or job interviews or whatever everyone can have an opinion on.

I've been a lurker for over 5 years and embarrassingly didn't realize there were downvotes on this site. Guess I still don't have enough "Karma" (?) ...

~500 karma is the threshold to downvote.

Obvious bad faith arguments and wrong information get downvotes.

I rarely downvote good faith comments (even if they are wrong) and instead try to focus more on upvoting good comments. However, I do downvote obvious spam, trolling, etc.

I randomly down vote good comments to help people cure their internet points addiction. It's my way of giving back to the community!

I’m not any kind of downvoter because it’ll take me a decade to have enough internet points to be permitted to contribute in this way.

Never downvote. If a comment was just racial slurs or something, others will downvote. Otherwise, never downvote an idea regardless of 'provocativeness' or otherwise. In fact the provocative approach can often be what breaks cognitive dissonance. hunter s thompson or matt taibbi for example do this well. Gonzo journalism is easier to consume than yellow journalism coming from mass media.

>For example, I'll sometimes see a massively downvoted comment that's constructive and beautifully written, but it carries an opinion that is not currently popular for whatever reason.

Agreed. This is toxic to community and shuts down discussion. In fact I might even suggest that this happening essentially breaks the community. Not sure what to call it, but its not a community anymore.

>I believe that downvoting someone just because you disagree with them is terrible for a discussion network like HN. Moreover, I would say that I learned the most from the comments that I disagreed with - on all levels, politically, technologically, personally.

This is really bad on HN. Not as bad as Reddit obviously. This has been more recently bad because we are a society inflection point. Reddit/HN are just the battlegrounds. Hell even the universities are battegrounds. Back in the day the universities were all about free speech and having diverse discussions about everything. Today? That sure isnt happening anymore.

The exercise here isn't about how to get better discussions. It's about identifying the discussions you're not allowed to have. Climate change for example is completely off limits. Why is it off limits? There's a significant number of people who believe we are on the verge of human extinction. To argue against climate change in any degree is tantamount to encouraging or contributing to our extinction. That's literally terms of war.

It's interesting to try to find all the issues you aren't allowed to discuss on HN. You can then also see who is doing it and why. The curious thing is why they are so secretive.

When you understand, how does it work out? What's going to be the event that fixes this? It's going to take a major event. World war against china? A greater depression? They are right and we will be extinct in about 10 years? It's unclear what it will be, but there's something bad coming.

> Not sure what to call it, but its not a community anymore.

I've been thinking of this and spaces start to feel like an old-school gathering of snake oil salesmen: The primary interest starts to be either attracting upvotes/avoiding downvotes or 'presenting' oneself rather than finding people who share your interests.

> It's interesting to try to find all the issues you aren't allowed to discuss on HN. You can then also see who is doing it and why. The curious thing is why they are so secretive.

You want SUPER interesting, compare which topics you can discuss where. I love social computing and have been talking to people online since UseNet. What's interesting to me about the recent era is that the big players go out of their way to prevent new platforms from taking hold outside of their influence. Back in the day, if a mod was being out of pocket, you could just LEAVE and start your own listserve/IRC stuff/etc, and if admin in general went overboard, people would leave. (Remember Digg -> Reddit, or LJ -> Tumblr, or the protocol wars in the 90s and why we all ended up on the Web)?

Now if any platform gets big enough that allows for dissent, the current big guys just buy it out and censor it.

Unfortunately, this also means that the places that DO let you discuss these things also tend to be contrarian cesspools with no ideology other than 'you can't tell me what to do' which is terrible for discussion for OTHER reasons (4Chan, I'm looking at you).

>I've been thinking of this and spaces start to feel like an old-school gathering of snake oil salesmen: The primary interest starts to be either attracting upvotes/avoiding downvotes or 'presenting' oneself rather than finding people who share your interests.

Yes, that's what I tend to see.

>You want SUPER interesting, compare which topics you can discuss where. I love social computing and have been talking to people online since UseNet. What's interesting to me about the recent era is that the big players go out of their way to prevent new platforms from taking hold outside of their influence.

Parler and others yep.

>Now if any platform gets big enough that allows for dissent, the current big guys just buy it out and censor it.

Even to the point where government takes tiktok to court and such. Like it's pretty big.

>Unfortunately, this also means that the places that DO let you discuss these things also tend to be contrarian cesspools with no ideology other than 'you can't tell me what to do' which is terrible for discussion for OTHER reasons (4Chan, I'm looking at you).

Here I think I disagree. 4chan does have /b/ which is a cesspool but you can get conversations in all the other boards. That's the point of the design. The problem with 4chan is that it doesn't persist well enough.

> Parler and others yep.

Parler sunk itself in a different way. (As did the other right wing anti-censorship social media like Voat, Gab, etc.) In order to build a functioning platform, you need one of two things in your founding community:

1.) A lot of people. Basically a critical mass of normies. This is the TikTok strategy: Everybody can find something for them because there are enough people on the app, so they stay. It's a self-sustaining virtuous cycle.

2.) Some kind of special population that is unique or admired enough that uninvolved people want to join in order to involve themselves. This is more the early Web version of adoption: Those of us who were the first non-academics on the Web wanted to hang out here because this is where all the smart people were.

Parler et al. had the problem that their initial userbases were actively offputting to their ability to grow because the content is offputting to most people who aren't involved, so it comes off as culty instead of interesting. This is also an issue on a few lefty social media sites.

That said, while I think Parler et al. are pretty unhinged, I'm not super comfortable with the cheering on of making it more difficult for platforms to access internet logistics.

> Even to the point where government takes tiktok to court and such. Like it's pretty big.

Governments don't have a clue what they're doing in this area. The greatest danger isn't direct government censorship, it's in sousveillance and self-censorship a la Reddit moderator lockstep opinion.

> Here I think I disagree. 4chan does have /b/ which is a cesspool but you can get conversations in all the other boards. That's the point of the design. The problem with 4chan is that it doesn't persist well enough.

It's all related. I have a soft spot in my heart for 4Chan even though I'm far too old for it now. 4Chan was literally founded to be contrarian when it broke off from SA, and that is going to be embedded in its design decisions and culture. It doesn't persist well enough BECAUSE it was founded as a contrarian refuge; it's harder to run a contrarian refuge if people can have sustained identities because it enables things like coalitions and harassment. I think 4Chan and image boards are valuable, just terrible for discussion.

>Parler et al. had the problem that their initial userbases were actively offputting to their ability to grow because the content is offputting to most people who aren't involved, so it comes off as culty instead of interesting. This is also an issue on a few lefty social media sites.

I think you're right, but the reason they were so vehemently attacked was because they didn't want the normies to go. You can recover when the normies show up. That's also the big fear. Places like rumble will likely super boost up normie stuff for this reason.

>Governments don't have a clue what they're doing in this area. The greatest danger isn't direct government censorship, it's in sousveillance and self-censorship a la Reddit moderator lockstep opinion.

I think part of it as well, anything you post on say reddit will be hosted in the usa and it lets their snowden stuff work. If tiktok were hosted in canada or elsewhere. they lose that ability. which is why oracle and microsoft were planning to host it for them. It's about lawful intercept to be sure.

>It's all related. I have a soft spot in my heart for 4Chan even though I'm far too old for it now. 4Chan was literally founded to be contrarian when it broke off from SA, and that is going to be embedded in its design decisions and culture. It doesn't persist well enough BECAUSE it was founded as a contrarian refuge; it's harder to run a contrarian refuge if people can have sustained identities because it enables things like coalitions and harassment. I think 4Chan and image boards are valuable, just terrible for discussion.

And that's totally why they arent a community.

Almost never downvote, only if I see something blately stupid without supporting arguments or non-constructive.

I downvote whenever I disagree. Observation of downvotes has led me to believe that's the community standard.

Almost never downvote unless someone is objectively wrong and is also incapable of being corrected.

I downvote whenever I think a comment was made in bad faith.

I don't downvote often, but when I do I downvote dang performing has janny duties. That guy needs a life.

I follow the maxim: “The downvote is not a disagree button.” I don’t downvote differences of opinion.

I downvote trolls and outlandish and objectively false lies (e.g. Bill Gates put microchips in the vaccines). That’s about it. I’m extremely liberal but I don’t downvote conservatives. They are as entitled to their opinion as I am to mine.

Check this: https://idownvotedbecau.se/

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