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Comment by ericwaller | Hacker News Reader

I voted this up because I think it's the beginning of an interesting discussion, but (in general) I disagree. I'd like to know what types of discussions you think suffer the most.

Tech-wise, I think the site is more diverse then ever, there seems to have been a decline in general lisp-evangelism since I joined about a year ago.

Though I might agree that there is a certain "start-up philosophy" to which any reference is guaranteed upvotes, but competing ideas are usually just as well received.

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This observation was in regards to the http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=297080

Regardless of whether I am right, I am basically the only countering argument and reduced to a grayed out presence.

I do not care emotionally a bit whether I am read, this is an intellectual observation regarding YC's downvoting of anti-mainstream thought while promoting much of the same.

You cared enough about it to post this (which seems a bit narcissistic, no matter what you say). I upmodded your original comment, so right at the moment it isn't a "grayed out presence" but I'm not going to upmod this.

Maybe your right, but I just saw a greyed out post (my own) that seemed like the only good counter (again, maybe only because it's my own viewpoint). The rest of the discussion did not seem like MEAT, thus this post.

Why would you have an intellectual argument about an empirical question?

Well, I don't think that comment should have been down voted, you were starting a discussion by disagreeing from experience.

I don't like the idea of down voting comments you simply disagree with as long as the content isn't harmful (I realize that "harmful" in this context is common pro-censorship vocab, I just mean that comments like "all root passwords should be set to 'password'" should be downvoted).

It'd be interesting if a down vote were actually a special case of reply and required an explanation.

The man asked if people who lifted weights wanted to test his app. Debating the merits of weightlifting had nothing to do with that post. If he had included, "you should lift weights because it's really good for you" then perhaps your argument would have been relevant. As it stands it wasn't and I see no problem with down-voting posts based on irrelevancy.

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