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Comment by nomel | Hacker News Reader

I think it will hide discourse rather than trolls since, I strongly believe, people just wouldn't approve things they disagreed with or go against their beliefs. I don't see a value in a public conversation that allows one to silence another (well, besides spam/trolls of course, but "trolls" has mostly lost its meaning).

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Reminds me of how "letters to the editor" have worked for ages. A good faith editor picks out the best responses both praising and criticizing.

I think it's extremely important to not assume good faith/lack of bias, with anything of importance. I would prefer the option to see all responses, with "accepted" responses, from the editor, being the default view.

I don't see why that's a problem. They always can start their own conversation about the same topic if I, the conversation starter, don't find their contribution to my conversation valuable.

Wouldn't that strengthen the echo-chamber effect? If the original poster supports position X and does not allow anyone who supports position Y in to the conversation, then a position Y person will eventually start another thread and not allow anyone from position X to reply. So now you have two threads: one for position X supporters and one for position Y supporters, with no cross-talk between the two.

Unless, of course, there's some kind of mechanism that gives threads with higher engagement more prominence? That might create an incentive to have more inclusive conversations. Although that might incentivise trolling too...

EDIT: Perhaps combine the above with a reputation system, where you can see how ban-happy an original poster is. Since people don't like to waste their effort writing a reply that just gets ignored, ban-happy posters would be penalised by lack of engagement. Then platform provided moderation could just become a kind of 'meta-moderation' - basically just banning people who try to game the system (e.g. posting threads saying 'please reply so I can get my ban percentage down').

This could just limit the types of conversations that flourish on the service.

If neither party is adult enough to participate, then perhaps twitter and facebook aren’t the right places to have controversial discourse.

I could however see it leading to echo chamber threads, or sham threads where one party is deliberately providing a weak counter-argument, a bit like a fox news interview to a right wing politician.

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