Happy 15th birthday Hacker News
news.ycombinator.com
news.ycombinator.com
* first learned about CRDTs, kickstarting an interest in distributed systems
* first learned about TLA+, kickstarting an interest in formal specification
* first saw the book Quantum Computing Since Democritus recommended (in a post about Professor Sussman’s reading list), kickstarting an interest in quantum computing
* first learned about the LEAN theorem prover, kickstarting an interest in machine-checked proofs of correctness for mathematical theorems
* first learned about tree-sitter, leading me to write a tree-sitter grammar for TLA+
All of these (well, except quantum computing really - that remains a pleasant side-hobby although I did work in Microsoft’s quantum program for a bit) are now things I use in the contracts I work on as an independent software engineering consultant, and the open source work I do in between. TLA+ especially has had an enormous impact. Five good posts over the course of ten years is still a pretty good signal/noise ratio!
Speaking of which, let's keep HN a liberal and welcoming place also for corps/startups (but not astroturfers) where key developers, experts from non-IT, CEOs/CTOs can have a voice as that's what makes HN unique IMO.
I was in high school in the early 2000s and Slashdot was like a haven for me.
I grew up in a town where I didn't know anyone in technology, let alone professional programmers.
But thanks to the internet I could get onto Slashdot and talk to other nerds and interact with real live professional programmers.
I haven't logged into my account in years but in hindsight that site meant a huge amount to me.
I like HN, but it could do with people being maybe a bit less uptight and a bit lighter sometimes. The comment section seems to have quite a few pedantic know it-alls taking themselves way to seriously; just like slashdot used to. Welcoming is maybe not a term I'd necessarily use for this.
Anyway, happy birthday HN!
I'd actually use the term "welcoming" in this context.
Do you mind sharing more information about this, please?
That's a fair point, but at least the one thing we don't have here (for the most part) in comparison to /. is the steady stream of comments of the
- GNAA
- In Soviet Korea Only Old People Spy You With Email
- Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those
- X is dying, Netcraft confirms it.
- etc.
sort. Not that some of that stuff wasn't funny for a moment, but it definitely grew stale after a while.
HN was immediately the opposite: a place you could read the comments before the article.
news.yc, like all other mimetic communities on the web, has its flaws. For ex, it reserves plenty wrath and fury for a certain type of corps and upstarts. Not sure if that's a good or a bad thing; but, It is a thing.
HN came around at the right time, and really had a better community with a good signal:noise ratio. The moderating system (flagging, up/down votes, and of course @dang and his predecessors) really helped.
One thing that's really impressed me as time has gone on is how far the expertise has expanded. I have bookmarked a bunch of users who consistently add solid insights, often with deep domain expertise sometimes from very unexpected quarters (diesel technicians, biologists, farmers, artists, musicians ...). They include @Animats @jdietrich @bkohlmann @nonbel @tptacek @zackmorris @jurassic @tamilama @patio11 @ries @nimbius @breakingcups @noduerme @300bps and many more.
I agree and I would also like to see more encouragement for solopreneurs. As financial independence through solopreneurship has a better probability of being achieved than creating an unicorn startup; especially when not having a safety-net.
So maybe less of 'Why are you making money' when an indie showcases their product, While defending bad practices of Trillion dollar mEga corps. as 'They have to make money'!
P.S. Happy birthday HN, Congratulations & thanks to P.G, Initial set of users, Current users and of course Dan.
I want to especially thank Dang for keeping this place consistent.
Took me 7 years to create an account though. Wish I had done it sooner!
Especially ALWAYS reading the comments BEFORE the actual articles! Thanks!
/.
Hope they are taking great care of you at YC!
1. For those unaware, Guido, the creator of Python, who remained the Benevolent Dictator for life until 2018.
1. Eternal September: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
2. (and what I like to call) Eternal October: https://googlepress.blogspot.com/2000/10/google-launches-sel...
In a billion years, when an alien species reaches earth and sees the ruins of human civilization, somehow one of the last remaining transmissions is that voice, calmly reminding everyone that anything is possible… at Zombocom
The Venture Capitalists and startuppers that made HN like the internet to be Free enough that new businesses and services can thrive, and Open Source for the accessible and reusable building blocks for their projects, but clearly like commercialization and being the middleman, like in the good old offline days. The headache of moderating their platforms feels more urgent than thinking about Freedom of Speech.
The early internet, to me, was the promise to remove those middlemen and have us directly connect, and, while using mostly free and low-overhead websites or services, contribute back. I expected real estate classifieds posted in an open format to open databases by now, and the job description of "real estate agent" retired.
When I think if "upholding" anything I might think of Slashdot clearly preaching Open Source and the Evils of Microsoft. Naive by today's standards but hey, it kept the old ethos alive for a little longer.
Edit: No doubt many other excellent values were upheld by HN and the moderators, so thanks for that!
That should probably be a whole separate post of its own! In fact, I'd encourage you, if you're interested, to consider writing up something on the topic and submit it as a new post. I think there's a lot to dig into with regards to what we all thought the "early promise of the Internet" was, and analyze it in terms of where we were wrong, where we've fallen short of the ideas, and - maybe most importantly - where there's room to take specific action(s) to get "back on the rails" so to speak.
Maybe tech will eventually be commodizided enough to give key infrastructure applications back to the "people". Or maybe the cloud providers will control it all? We'll see.
Everyone here would do well to read and understand this essay by Jaron Lanier:
https://www.edge.org/conversation/jaron_lanier-digital-maois...
I also recommend people revisit archives of some high-quality web forums and websites like Geocities. There is a lot of revisionism going on in tech sector right now. Conveniently, it's nearly impossible to challenge in a space where a handful of people can disappear your posts by downvoting and a conversation stays "relevant" only for a few hours.
The same thing does happen to an extent during in person conversations but the barrier for both making a challenging statement and "downvoting" a challenging statement or action is higher.
HN may not be able to actually BE what Web 1.0 was but it seems to make an honest attempt at it in the modern world.
Another part is the consistent website design, it helps in focusing on the essentials, i.e. the articles and the discussions.
And last but not least i try to be the best I can when posting here.
I think this is a good time to admit that when I first came here, I was a bit shy to post anything about tech or programming, but by hanging out here and practicing what I learned here, I eventually felt worthy of contributing.
Thank You.
> Well its not a totally useless link submission...
Even our earliest comment ancestors had the signature HN venom.
>YouTube: "identifying copyrighted material can't be an automated process." Startup disagrees.
Arrington was something of a meme back in those days.
I have a hunch that was what prompted pg ("I never write a line of code unless I have to") to close old threads to new comments.
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-10-08
Here are all the days with posts from 2006-10-09 through 2007-02-19:
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-10-09
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-10-10
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-10-11
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-10-12
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-10-13
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-10-14
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-10-15
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-10-17
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-10-22
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-12-14
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2007-02-19
What happened in between? Was HN tweaked and then relaunched?
document.querySelectorAll('.titlelink').forEach((link) => link.href = "https://web.archive.org/web/20070601000000*/" + link.href);
Fifteen years gone by
watching tech fads come and go.
Was that time well spent?
Now I am trying to remember if there was anything special about BBS's that could be used to identify old-timers.
God that brings back memories. I checked my /. profile just now and see that I still have an AIM id and an ICQ id listed there. Yikes. And the email address points to a domain I haven't owned in like 15 years. At least the jabber address I had listed is actually still active.
[3148]: https://slashdot.org/~raph
The place I really miss is kuro5hin. That site was a gem.
Another site, less known than kuro5hin that was great for awhile was called Jyte. You just post whatever random statement you want, and people can vote "agree" or "disagree". The community was amazing. It was kind of like a game where you try to find some issue where reasonable people are roughly equally split. It was also something where you could just interject any topic you like for any reason. Maybe that's what people get out of twitter -- I don't use it myself.
Also, checking now I can't believe I joined so soon after this website was announced. Now I wish I had invested in BTC when it was considered as expensive at $100.
One curiosity for a social site is that despite being pretty active here, and having some good exchanges, I've never actually connected with someone here. It's a forum rooted in ideas, not people, and that's reinforced by its product restraints: no avatars, no following, no DMs, no blackbox algorithms. I really appreciate that, vis-a-vis other parts of the internet, though I do occasionally wish I could connect with the people behind the ideas.
One funny quirk of being such an eng-oriented forum is a long time ago they let you sign up without an email, which meant when I lost my password I had to start a new account. I'd love to restore my original username.
Thankfully HN hasnt dropped in quality on that front unlike reddit. Its still so good I dont even click on the link I click on comments to get a HN summary which gives me a pretty good idea if its worth reading or not. Most of the time the comments are even better and more informative.
I've heard these sorts of shots taken at Reddit since I started using it in 2011 (I was late to the game) and I'm fascinated by it. I use Reddit every day and am in constant awe of how it is populated with such a wide breadth of people with such a strong passion and expertise about virtually any subject I enjoy.
Many times a week i type "reddit <some topic I'm curious about>" and the top threads/comments are almost always someone with better knowledge on that subject than anything else I can find on the internet.
It's just funny how everyone's perception is different, but I think Reddit is a modern marvel.
There have been multiple times on Reddit I saw a comment about something I personally had deep knowledge of, and was astounded at how inaccurate the comment was relative to the thousands of upvotes and dozens of awards it had.
This has made me wary of comments relating to subjects I have zero expertise in, as I can't properly evaluate if they're correct and I can't trust the responses or upvotes because those might come from people with as little expertise in the subject as me.
Since upvotes don't correlate with truthfulness, they only correlate with popularity, they're useless as a measurement of how accurate a comment is. This is usually exacerbated by how popular a given subreddit is, with smaller niche subreddits being better (in my experience).
That said I do indeed go to Reddit first for most of my purchasing or entertainment decisions, just have to be careful to take any info there with a massive heaping of salt.
Happy 15th!
Similarly, I think that Reddit optimizes for groupthink even more than Twitter does. Good luck having an insightful conversation in /r/pol or /r/conservative or even some technology subreddit.
And mind, I think Twitter Inc is absolutely awful and Twitter is a societal ill. I just don't perceive a significant degree of difference between it and Reddit with respect to discourse.
Things aren't that bad, but I've definitely noticed a lot more cases of downvoting of "against the grain" comments or opinions with often very few responses in the last couple of years.
Previously, I rarely noticed heavily downvoted comments, and in the cases they were, there were almost always reply comments explaining the opposite side, leading to IMO much better discourse and discussion.
But there has been a chilling effect in recent years where more and more topics become verboten and someone will get downvoted, at a minimum, for even bringing them up. Interesting topics and child threads go missing on the regular. We're even at a point now where certain corporate press releases cannot even be questioned at all, despite the same corporations being stuck with heavy fines for similar past behavior they're being accused of now.
I still like HN for the purely technical aspects, but I don't know anyone who still views it as a place where complex ideas that affect society can be discussed anymore.
That's not HN. When you get downvoted for hot-button political stuff, that's like getting shushed for talking about football in church. It's not censored, but this isn't the place for it.
It basically outsourced the work of making sure users are of decent tech savviness and good faith.
That doesn't sound right! What is an example?
It can come in a variety of forms. https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/109634/1/MPRA_paper_109634.p... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...
Reputation Management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reputation_management which obviously protects income streams for entities, but the military also protect businesses online because they are protecting money coming in from abroad, this is what politics is all about, placating the public which business gets its way, stuff you probably dont need to know about and so wont be taught about it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
That's exactly the problem -- HN is now reddit-lite.
It was enough to prevent me from contributing to the discussion until recently.
Certain beliefs or opinions in the minority are not very well tolderated here. It's still certainly better than other sites, but from my perspective it is slowly sliding downwards.
If I do post, it likely would not be anything remotely controversial.
I find it easier to hold a slightly controversial opinion here than it has ever been possible on Reddit, especially the programming and tech subreddits which are very low quality in general.
The downvote button is awful, but why is it surprising that controversial opinions are downvoted? Being downvoted is the proof the opinion is controversial. It would be better if people weren't cancelled because they go against the grain, sure, but we don't live in a perfect utopia of perfectly rational beings.
1. Click on the next thing in the feed.
2. Upvote/downvote.
3. Leave one-liner comment.
4. Got to #1.
The upvote button also acts a bit like a Rotten Tomatoes score, in that it compresses the full range of "scores" people might give something down into just "did you like it or not." So something that a thousand people can like just enough to vote for, will end up upvoted much more highly than something that 100 people absolutely love. The things you see rising to the top are thus whatever is "blandly agreeable" to the most people, rather than what is "seriously amazing" to a non-negligible subset of people.
---
IMHO a "proper" solution for both of these problems would be entirely different than what we've got now.
• The primary factor for ranking posts/comments would be an "engagement score", coming from how long in aggregate users spend actually looking at/reading the comment or linked page (which is in fact practical to observe if this social-bookmarking service is interacted with primarily through a browser extension / app, as would be the modern trend.)
• Posts (and comment threads) would additionally gain some (diminished) bonuses from the aggregate scores of their child-comment subtrees. So boring posts/root-comments with engaging comments subthreads would still rise to the top, to ensure that those subthreads are surfaced to appreciate. (Probably there'd have to be UX for this case, highlighting the aspect of the post+comments that's so engaging.)
• Something upvote-like would still exist (though it'd be optional for the system's functioning, because of the engagement score); but adding one would require a proof-of-work (e.g. solving a CAPTCHA.) This signal could thus be factored quite strongly when available (presuming the service has sufficient anti-botting measures in place.)
• You can actually upvote things multiple times — but the proof-of-work required would be exponentially-increasing. One CAPTCHA for one point; another two for a second point; another four for a third point. This solves the "Rotten Tomatoes" problem.
• No downvotes; instead, comments can mark themselves as being a "rebuttal" to the post/comment they're responding to. (Maybe entirely-separate "comment" and "rebut" UX flows.) The aggregate engagement+upvote scores of all "rebuttals" to a thing, would then be inherited as a "malus", i.e. a bonus with the sign flipped; high-scoring rebuttals lower the rank of the thing they rebut, which means that that thing then has less of a score to contribute as a bonus to its own ancestors.
• This down-ranking would be applied recursively from the leaf nodes up; the malus of a rebuttal on its ancestors would be "weakened" if the rebuttal was hit with a malus from high-powered rebuttals of its own.
> posts/root-comments with engaging comments subthreads would still rise to the top, to ensure that those subthreads are surfaced to appreciate. (Probably there'd have to be UX for this case, highlighting the aspect of the post+comments that's so engaging.)
I think HN does something like that, and I appreciate they don't have any particular UX to indicate any "surfacing", but it's just organically applied to the ranking.
Example:
* Just posted top-level comments get the first spot for some time, so people have a chance to interact with them. Often you open a big thread with hundreds of comments and the first comment is 1 minute old. That's great.
* I'm pretty sure HN (and possibly Reddit, but I have no evidence for either) rank a top-level comment higher if a reply has a lot of votes/engagement.
* I'm somewhat positive HN downranks top-level comments that have a very high number of downvoted/controversial/high comment-to-vote ratio replies. I'm certain HN does that for posts (comments > vote = probably controversial post, slightly downranked).
* All of these things don't require UX, so they're a little opaque so people won't try to gamify their comments to manually nudge them toward some position in the thread.
Unlike the other commenters, I'm not worried about it. It's just a sign of growth and HN going mainstream. The mods keep everyone on a tight leash, so I think the content will remain good.
It is a bit frustrating to post something that feels high quality but people disagree. But that's the price you pay for not being perfect to everyone all the time. (You see? It's impossible.) So don't let it bug you.
I also think the peer moderation on here is broken. Again, it’s better than Reddit but I still think HN can improve things. I have a few ideas on how that could work but I don’t think there’s any incentive to change the status quo (and I sympathise with why too).
On /. it was COMMON to be participating in a discussion about (for example) a camera problem on one of NASAs' probes, and very soon you would discover that the actual people from NASA that were working on it were in the forum talking about what they were actually doing and getting to the core issues rather then the press-release fluff.
If there was a science/tech story you could almost guarantee that the authors of the paper themselves would show up, and all of a sudden you would get 10PHD's from different fields all "working together".
There was another thread that I remember a bit better because I was involved in it. Somebody had an old/obscure bit of computer hardware that was last used in a 386. (A tape-drive backup that used the floppy-controller to read/write data to the drive.) The person was desperate to get a copy of his thesis off of the drive, but there was a hardware failure on both the drive and the old PC.
Well in the thread one of the old engineers that had designed the drive at his old company chimed and said he had the part that was broken and would ship it out to him. Then another person offered to send a USB to Floppy controller so that his "new PC" (sans floppy interface) would be able to work. THEN the tech director of a major backup company (software) offered his labs to have the the whole PC & tape drive shipped to their headquarters where the lab would get the files off the drive for free because "I want my team to have the chance to train on this, and learn how to restore it all."
In the end it was a happy story for the end-user. But I see a similar gathering of the minds on HN as I once did on Slashdot.
My /. ID was 5 digits.... The internet was different back then, but it's nice to see that people can still be the same.
Happy birthday HN :)
Covid and WFH probably contributed to that growth as well.
Was curious about this post. Found it here [1]. Reading this was interesting and felt a bit like going back in a time-machine. Hot or Not was a fantastic site -because it inspired a lot of my friends and myself in the early 2000s to build similar things. One thing I didn't realise is how much money the site was making then. Wikipedia claims it was doing $7m in revs in 2008
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20070419061100/http://james.hoto...
Happy birthday!
P.S: I think it's one of those threads that can have the old /. or reddit feeling, posting messages without much substance but that do still feel good and even with an oldschool smiley ; )
Not sure who to but thank you.
I too am a beneficiary of this neo-polis of tech and philosophy.
Sure I am grateful to dang and all the members. of the community. I guess
I have a bit of conflict on the origin of the community, not saying there is anything wrong in what it is but maybe no connections with a private initiative would make me feel more comfortable, but I guess that it is what it is and I should say thank you to Y Combinator too.
- Simplicity
- Open-minded, ego-less debate
- A great community, moderated just right
But the actual YC link is 404
https://web.archive.org/web/20140625052305/http://ycombinato...
Wonder how HN moderators deal with spam? I have a phpBB3 (was phpBB2) forum for 17 years, still running, and had to be inventive with spam: for the last 5 years you have to solve a dot product and answer a logic question during registration. It may exclude some genuine visitors unfortunately. Also migrated the server to different VPS companies, it takes energy to keep a forum running, a popular site such as HN in particular.
So thank you HN admins!
Still using spacer gifs though hah.
It will inspire great gratitude for HN.
10 mins(time to read/write comment) x $120/hr
= $20 x 30 days/mo x 0.5 (every other day)
= $300/mo x 15 years x 8% (compounded annually)
= $100kThe longevity and quality of HN discussion is much appreciated.
And that's when I make another donation to the vital Internet Archive
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1901
Happy birthday, HN! And thank-you dang, for all you do.
Love this place, thanks to all for making it possible. Let's keep it great for at least another 15 years.
Thanks Dang
Thank you to Dang and the HN team for keeping this site quality.
Obligatory and much warranted shouts of thanks to Dang.
Trying to find my 'green' posts now for memory lane
Did read HN for quite a while, not 15 years though and started spamming it just a few years ago.
Big thanks to dang and everyone involved.
I think Bruce Perens shutdown technocrat.net because it's just a p.i.t.a. running a forum like this [2].
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20080110105629/http://technocrat...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20090104214806/http://technocrat...
Asking for my apple friends...is there a similar app in the walled garden?
tl;dr I think this platform made me more humble!
A big "thank you" to the community :)
HN is still my go to source of news about almost anything. Ukraine crisis, health tech, startups, computer history, new technologies... anything. Right now, I literally have hundreds (yes) tabs open to just read the comments.
But HN also made me learn something. It was first 3-4 years ago and I still see the same signals every month or at least at 2-3 months. It is: "even if you have %98 correlation between things you and other people like there can be some fundamental differences between you and them and if you dig these things you will just drift apart"
We have a lot in common. A lot of us believes on tried and tested technologies instead of latest SmthJS. We still advocate Firefox instead of Chrome to serve libre software. We think that the power and money is highly concentrated on a handful of people and the distribution is not fair (but not the "5 families are managing the world" shit). We want free flowing data. We want the soul of web 1.0 back. Etc..
But what's detail and what's fundamental is different per person and I think the things we agree on is the details. We are different in fundamentals. We have very different world views and we fundamentally want different things from life.
Ok, 2 paragraphs ago I said that I noticed these things 3-4 years ago and here is the samples I remember:
* It was first started with GDPR. I possibly can't find the comment but I literally read a comment saying: "These are the reasons why Europe can't have successful startups. For a 3-4 people startup there is no way to delete PII from db. There is too much foreign keys in db to do that. Also we have sharding, replication etc. This increases the costs for smaller startups".
MVP and "over engineering" are not binary terms. There must be a middle ground. But we can't agree on that because the middle ground changes based on our opinions. And in my opinion Privacy is not something you can gloss over for mvp or because you are a startup. For example can you save clear-text passwords just because you are startup? What about SSL? Even letsencrypt requires some work. Do you thing this is a "burden on startups"? What about people in Germany who wants their home to be blurred on maps software? If you can't satisfy their demands then maybe you are not in their market to sell your software. Just please stop pretending you are immune to the problems because you are not "big enough". What's the difference between the news from 2010s that Facebook employee reading old girlfriends private messages and your developer can do a select * from users where gender="female"?
* Contemning people who prefer a more work-life balanced work and a hand of government on "free market" is another thing bothers me. By the way I'm from Turkey and I don't have a horse in EU-US game but "oh, you make 60k in 1 year? what a loser", "EU don't have startups because they go home at 5pm", "They don't have startups because they don't do hackathons" or "They don't have startups because they have unions" is a just a very myopic way of looking at life.
The United States is the only country among the 38 member OECD nations that has not passed laws requiring businesses and corporations to offer paid maternity leave to their employees. Netherlands will send a nurse for 1 whole week to the home of the mother and they will even do the groceries so the mother can get at least a little sleep. I will just rest my case here. Oh sorry, I also think that no one in Germany gets bankrupt just because they call an ambulance.
* Why can't we have businesses? Just normal businesses without obsession over growth, being a unicorn, getting bought by FAANG or IPO? Why don't we have more pinboard, screenjar, nomadlist, simpleanalytics or lunchmoney? I learned all of this sites from HN and I'm pretty sure they are operating like normal businesses.
I can understand that after you become successful, someone or some company can approach you to buy you. But starting with that idea from day 1? I can't understand that. Linode got acquired, redis also, lastpass too. Why do I have to constantly follow the blog/news pages of the companies I work with so that my information does not fall into the hands of companies I do not want? Why can't you silicon valley guys can't just have an idea, execute that idea with a couple of developers, employ some accountant, hr manager etc and call it a day? Raise the prices yearly a little bir more than inflation and live a life? Maybe answer some customer mails yourself so thay can also feel a connection. Maybe just meet some of your customers? I can't understand the obsession with growth. That's the reason why our planet is in this situation. You can double your growth infinitely and keep a healthy relationship with anything.
But, I love you guys. I can say that in the last 10 years possibly %40 of the things I learned was from HN. I wish you a happy weekend.
There are some topics that are very predictable, some of them are noticeably left issues, some things more loosely connected. Crypto, Tesla, Brave, Facebook, Israel, etc. are all subjects you'll most likely get heavily downvoted and probably flagged if you don't view the common (to here) opinion.
HN is not immune to group think and talking points get parroted here often, dissenting views flagged and downvoted. But not always, it's definitely nowhere near Reddit bad.
Like I said at the top, it's the best place on the internet to have a discussion, but not perfect, and seemingly getting a worse slowly, the way it always seems to go.
The flipside is I can actually share my somewhat left of center views without being flagged and downvoted into oblivion as long as I practice a little decorum. If anything, the quality is up because people have to put a little effort in now.
Decorum is always welcome, but that's not really what I'm talking about, my main observation has been the group think, parroting of talking points, downvoting without disputing, and most importantly flagging to disagree with/hide dissent.
Some topics draw it more than others, I mentioned the obvious ones, it seeps into others though.
It doesn't matter how cordial you are, sometimes you will be flagged for your contrarian views.
Honestly user flagging and possibly even downvoting should be removed, it's abused too much.
A simple block button that would hide all posts from the user for that client would suffice, mods could look at block rates of a post/user and review if it is spam or breaks the rules.
I'm sorry but I don't need another person's opinion of a post to grey out or hide a comment. I can make the judgement for myself whether I disagree with it or not.
Congratulations.
And if it is so aggravating to you, why do you keep coming back?