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Comment by dmafreezone | Hacker News Reader

HN is a bubble within a bubble. It’s where Kagi rules the search world and Google is all but a dessicated corpse. It’s also a place with a karma system, encouraging only the most bubbleworthy discussion and discouraging any posts from dissidents. I would put a negative weight on sentiments here when averaging them with those elsewhere.

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Welcome green commenter!

I regularly see "posts from dissidents" here on HN, but I do notice that they are all strongly written, well-argued and often contain citations to support their position. Is there an asymmetry in the way karma is awarded to "bubble" and "non-bubble" positions? Probably, but that doesn't mean non-bubble never makes it.

Could it be that karma rewards different things than you believe?

So it takes strong writing, good arguments, and citations for a dissident to have any hope of being seen. Since that doesn’t describe every upvoted HN comment, what are you really saying here?

Not saying you are wrong, but let's not dismiss the need for good argumentation when you say something out of the norm. Dissidence with arguments does a great service to everyone involved.

Having said that, people here do downvote based on opinion allignment, which is very hurtful. I've seen perfectly legit comments (with sources) that are out of the norm being downvoted because people just don"t agree with them

> what are you really saying here?

that expecting to see the full range of human opinion on any even vaguely controversial topic in a single context is foolish, and that i'm tired of people complaining about "dissidents" not showing up on HN when they clearly do (even if they are (surprise!) in a minority of top-ranked comments.

ps. I never downvote on HN unless someone has actually made a grievous factual error or is being personally abusive.

if you turn showdead on in your profile, you'll see a lot of absolute crap that should be dead. But I've also started to notice more and more comments that don't deserve to be flagged dead. Just comments against the hivemind, which sucks. I asked dang if he'd be willing to give an endpoint that just surfaces dead items but he refused.

HN is useful for discussion on cutting edge stuff. It's a great place to overhear conversations about what's important to tech people. I've learned a lot from this community. But you're right -- certain insular, minority opinions seem to get unusual airtime here. They make the discussions unbalanced.

I've long thought about making a bot which automatically upvotes all downvoted comments. If enough users here used it, it would reverse these trends and force dissenting opinions to be taken seriously. This is not reddit, where the average greyed out comment is some nazi stuff. Here, most greyed out comments are just feather rustlers doing their duty. We are lucky to have them, else we surround ourselves with sycophants and yes-people.

>I've long thought about making a bot which automatically upvotes all downvoted comments.

You'll just get banned.

Pro-AI comments regularly get downvoted. I find this amusing or sad. Or maybe both.

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