Ask Dang: Remove the Downvotes?

@dang can we remove the downvote system? Over the last months, I’ve had multiple situations where I tried to say something positive about either Elon Musk or something negative about the democratic party and in most cases this just resulted in a bunch of downvotes. This led me to stop talking about it to not loose karma.

The problem is that it makes this website more of an echo chamber than it should be. If anything non-conformist could mean the loss of karma, then people are incentivized to just conform to the prevailing opinion.

This is important because as we’ve now seen, Trump has won even though (almost) nobody here on HN expresses anything positive about Trump. This is a big problem for HN because apparently it’s disconnected from reality. Yes I’m here to talk about geek stuff, but I am especially interested in a reasonably unbiased opinion of what other engineers think. I don’t think the downvoting system helps with this.