I really don't think that HN lets dissenting opinions thrive (well, not anything that is truly controversial but not clearly hateful). That may feel cozy but it's not a reflection of anything pure or good, imo.
Every single one of them set off the flamewar detector. That's extremely unusual. If it were one or two I'd call it random, but 11 in a row, whatever the reason, is not random. We turned off that software penalty on about half of those threads.
It does make sense that DaringFireball would consider starting a flamewar a job well done, but of course HN is optimizing for the opposite.
I'd come to that conclusion after scraping all "past" front pages from 2006 through May-ish 2023 and doing a number of analyses of that corpus. (I've commented on that a few times here on HN and on the Fediverse.)
One of the absolute spiciest discussions ever was a pg post about HN itself. Which suggests that when a topic of of direct interest and familiarity, people will tend to hop on it. There are also a great many flame-y threads, though note that by virtue of making the front page, my sample probably skews to less disastrous threads with the absolute sh*tshows being well below the top-30 fold.
Among other weaknesses, spiciness doesn't distinguish between pure troll/clickbait threads, and those on which there's a significant and justified spread of opinion. As such, the metric makes hard discussions even harder to have, though mods can and do turn off the penalty on request (often many hours after the discussion's started, for obvious reasons, which is its own penalty). I do wish that HN could have those discussions, and I've thought and written (both on HN and in emails to mods) about what that might entail. I'm coming to the long-delayed and somewhat regrettable conclusion that it's not the right tool for that particular job.
I only really recognize this because I'll be actively reading/replying sometimes and see comments go +/- 2-3 up or down votes back and forth on the same comment. While you may be at say -2, that's just the aggregate. I sometimes wish I could see the total up/down votes just out of curiosity.
Mildly controversial opinions sometimes survive and get discussion, but anything past that rarely get a reply and just get downvoted and flagged into oblivion. This isn't exactly a slight against HN, as this happens basically everywhere past a tiny userbase community. But I don't think it's particularly right to put HN on a pedestal for its ability to handle controversy.
What more evidence do you need that spirited disagreement is alive and well here?
Your vouched items should be visible to you at https://news.ycombinator.com/vouched?id=dooglius
edit: sorry, I missed the sibling comment to this. I only ever come across dead comments, not posts. So I needed to add &kind=comment to see vouched comments.
For not-bad comments just vouch them, but for very-good-I-will-not-be-able-to-sleep-until-it-is-unkilled comments vouch and send an email.
Those people are wrong.
I reserve my downvotes for when arguments are made in bad faith, rely on logical fallacies, or present know-false information as an argument.
If someone presents an argument on something I disagree with, but it's made in good faith and is well-structured, it deserves an upvote, even if I still disagree afterwards.
The problem is that there is no one with power here that can come to the "little guy's" defence. There is no will around here for that kind of support, because the only people hired to wield such power are of like mind. DJT doesn't hire democrats, and this is no different.
Look at this comment section, and tell me this isn't an echo chamber.
> That's just life.
Life is the result of what we choose, alone and in our groups, and groupthink creates a momentum that is hard to understand from within the group.
Only compassion gives us a clear and accurate perspective on life, my friend.
And that's a fact, and its not being a factor in this site's m.o. is precisely why it is the way it is, why it is staffed by whom it's staffed by, and why its founder has the Twitter profile picture he does and why he rails against DEI.
It's also why your opinions are so valued here, and why you don't understand what I said.
Perhaps you won't be so privleged some day and then you will begin to really understand what life is really about.
Without such a gift from life, you will most likely just continue to think you understand, while asking far fewer questions than you should.
What role does compassion play in your life? That is the most genius question you can ever ask yourself, and is really the only one worth either asking or answering.
That fact is never accepted as truth by those who already "know it all". Such is the way of "facts". Unless your knowledge base is founded upon compassion, nothing truly eloquent will be perceived as such. Such is human life, my friend. All the rest is just mammalian, when it comes to human beings in their groups.
Is your group founded on compassion? That you don't value it does not mean it is not the most valuable concept in the universe.
"The Way goes in." --Rumi
I don't see how that's a problem. People that agree with them can upvote them and ungrey them out and push them back up.
> I disagree.
Head explodes
You can't argue in people's stead. If most dissenting commentary is hurtful, inciteful, manipulative, generally demagogue, etc., it's going to get culled, and you get a situation where "dissent isn't thriving".
Otherwise, what exactly is moderation for?
Moderation absolutely drives the culture, by setting a tone that drives away certain users while attracting others.
In other words what ever issues a site has are inherently due to moderation whether it be a choice on the part the moderators or a lack of resources to moderate as they would like to.
Personally I hope Tom will bring new moderation policies that will truly let unpopular opinions thrive, but I don't have high hopes here since this is just an announcement of a new moderator, not an announcement of new moderation policies.
"downvote" seems more appropriate for for "this is not interesting and should be less prominent".
"flag" seems more appropriate for "this should not be here at all".
By way of an example, on a political story, if you say something merely unpopular, you'll get downvotes and replies; if you say something hateful, you'll (usually) get flagged.
I don't think that's generally a function of the moderators though.
That's why I have only flagged one or two posts, ever, but not because I was mad, but because the comment was just plain beyond the pale.
And my posts against portaying violent rape in film got flagged.
Make it make sense, because I understand the failure of this system because systems are my trade-in-craft.
I have flagged a few comments but I'm rarely mad.
And if one is mad because of a disrespectful comment, the flagging is probably appropriate too.
Yes, indeed.
This is cope, just like "I'm being downvoted for speaking the truth!". Nobody thinks "wow, they said a true statement, I should downvote them".
I suggest you try to steelman the idea of flagging and see that maybe there could be other things at play.
Precisely. That's the biggest problem with closed-minded fools.
Or maybe you misunderstand (on purpose?). I'm saying you attribute those downvotes incorrectly. It's maybe natural to do so as an instinct -- "those people are against me!" -- but on HN it's expected to be a bit more introspective. It's incorrect to say that "people downvote because I'm right" or "people downvote because they have nothing to say".
There is a difference between expressing unpopular opinions (e.g. "manifest V3 is good"), which receive an appropriate level of considered disagreement; and expressing opinions that are removed administratively.
In my experience, the former is quite common, while the latter only occurs in cases of hateful or off-topic comments. That is as it should be. No one is obligated to agree with you, and that fact should not dissuade you from expressing yourself.
What I see a lot of is this:
User posts "$opinion $generalization $snark $dismissal $adhominem".
User gets down voted or flagged. User complains that downvotes are for expressing $opinion and that $opinion is not allowed on this site!
But we can all see the other things in their post that probably brought on most of the downvotes.
Most stuff I downvote is because of the way it's expressed, not because of the opinion itself.
That's not a moderation issue. You can post that opinion, and people will disagree with it, post responses to it, and downvote it. It will not be flagged out of existence, unless it's also violating site policy in other ways.
Meanwhile personal attacks and hyperbole regarding Elon Musk and Trump have become very common on HN.
Speaking from personal experience only: I have mostly not observed "polite, well-worded posts disagreeing with the mainstream" get downvoted to oblivion, unless some other factor also applies, such as that they're also things that seem likely to lead to a rehashed old-as-the-hills disagreement with no new information that will not on balance change any minds.
If you post (by way of example only, please observe the use-mention distinction here) a polite version of "ads are good and adblockers are stealing", and get a massive pile of downvotes, I think that's a reasonable signal that the community isn't interested in seeing iteration 47,902 of that argument, and has no expectation that anything new will come out of that argument. If you have something new to say on that topic that is likely to lead into new and interesting arguments, at this point you would need to signpost that heavily, prefacing it with some equivalent of "Please note that I'm aware this is an age-old argument, but I think I have a new point to make that is worth considering", and then actually make a new point, at which point I think you're less likely to get downvoted to oblivion.
Personally, I don't downvote "mere" disagreement. I downvote (among other things) what seems to me to be uninteresting or thoughtless or insufficiently diligent disagreement, or factually incorrect information, or anything that seems like a discussion that spawned from it will not be interesting.
Now, that said, another factor here is that some people posting on political topics in particular believe they're making "polite well-worded posts disagreeing with the mainstream", and others do not share that belief and flag it to oblivion. For example, posts expressing bigotry mostly get flagged, no matter how surface-level "polite" they are.
Sure, I imagine the grandparent poster means arguing something like "limiting access for extensons is good because they're often used to steal financial assets". Old extensions are sold, or cracked and updated to inclue malware.
Why is this required, in order not for the comment to be downvoted to oblivion? You may be confusing bias with nuance.
(It's still regularly abused on stories as a downvote, perhaps in part because stories don't have downvotes. HN sometimes "rescues" stories that get over-flagged, but it's still a problem.)
Personally, I’d prefer no up-/downvoting and flagging at all (or flagging only to alert moderators), and purely chronological threading. But I also think that active moderation and crowd-sourced ranking mechanics are two different things.
I think that's a very different kind of forum, and it needs different tools to be usable, and it more quickly fails into unusability.
For example, I think it's useful that on balance the top few comments and their discussion are likely to be interesting, and the last few comments are unlikely to be interesting.
I definitely DO NOT mean clear hate speech, etc.. that's not my point at all.
Shouting matches and rhetorical posturing are exhausting. There are places for that—most places online, anymore; this is not one of them.
But I'm the one that is rate limited in this thread and prevented from interacting with people politely.
On the other hand, I think it needs to be more specific in order to be valuable feedback. Which dissenting opinions? Can you provide specific examples of comments you think got unreasonably flagged?
There's been an uptick in political posts which are off-topic per the guidelines, so an uptick in the absolute number of flagged submissions would just mean the community is properly enforcing the guidelines, which is good. However, as a consequence of that uptick in political submissions and flagging, there's also an uptick in the number of users complaining a post is unjustly flagged, because they incorrectly conflate enforcing the guidelines with political opinion, and that is not good.
I think a lot of users are tired of this back and forth, so my guess is they are reading between the lines of what you said (since you didn't provide specifics) and filling in the blank with what _they_ think you mean about undeserved flagging, with the topic of politics being top of mind at the moment. This shows that being specific helps both by providing actionable feedback while also increasing clarity, which is your responsibility as a communicator.
A huge part of that is that the tone is almost always civil and the arguments are typically in good faith.
I can't really relate to the mindset of people who use downvoting as a 'I disagree' button.
I don't think this extends to the way that HN is moderated or run. It is worth looking at dang's posts every now and again to take in the job that he does and how patient he can be, even with antagonism aimed directly at HN or himself personally.
From time to time I also have a look at the histories of some of those antagonistic people. Frequently there are signs that their behaviour was not always like this. Recent posts might be outright abusive and sound like the postings of angry teenagers. A few years earlier they might have been posting reasonable discussions on their thesis topic or tutorials on some useful subjects. Keeping that in mind helps you realise that these are real people and there may be other things going on in their life.
I think there are some good things to learn from people who work with addicts. You can simultaneously challenge bad behaviour and be compassionate to the person who committed it. Similarly, this is why I'm not a fan of cancelling people or holding them forever accountable for past bad behaviour. If they recognise that their behaviour was bad and are endeavouring to not be that way again, I don't think permanent ostracism benefits anyone. If anything it restricts people to a community that amplifies their negative behaviour.
That's a valid use of the button by design, HN is literally made to allow for that use. Plus it mimics real life interactions - there is a social cost/friction to saying things people disagree with or think are outright wrong. Most online chitchat places deteriorate because they remove such social frictions.
I think there is a far greater real life social cost in violating standards of behaviour, such as aggressive engagement, or acting without empathy. I would argue that it is those influences that can be lacking in online discussions that cause them to deteriorate. There is also a lower barrier of entry for joining an online community than joining a real life community. A few dedicated but detrimental people can always evade safeguards and pollute a community to some degree, online communities being larger provide the possibility to each individual to do more damage, while also increasing the chances of there being individuals that would do so.
I would say this is straight up wrong. It is universal since it's fundamental to being a social animal. There's a cost to being at odds with a group. We do have all sorts of mechanism and rituals, formal and informal, to minimize or amortize that cost in all sorts of settings but it's still there and it's still essential. You look at the faces of your coworkers in a meeting in which you're making some unpopular proposal to see how it's going over and you feel the slight sting of recognizing the smallest hints of disapproval. It's built right into all human interaction.
Downvoting is a legitimate expression of disagreement according to PG.
Better sites don't do this and have in-good-faith discussion despite disagreement.
Dissenting views are regularly highly visible, often as replies to consensus views. Even better - well-argued counter-narrative/counter-conventional wisdom views regularly appear as top or highly ranked comments. That's because the people making those arguments do what sensible people do when making an unpopular argument - they put in the work to make their case more persuasive. They don't sit around complaining that the other kids don't listen to them, they care about their issue enough to try to work with human nature rather than hoping some magical technology will change human nature for them.
I do think most interesting conversation has moved from forums to group chats and podcasts for this reason though. Scott Alexander's blog also had good comments (though on a narrower subset of topics).
(chances are people will downvote without comment or scream "ThAtS nOt TrUe")
(Love how HN proved my comment as correct)
> (Love how HN proved my comment as correct)
Please don't do this here. It's against the site guidelines (see the bottom: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), which guarantees downvotes, and then the combination of help-help-I'm-being-repressed and I-told-you-so is annoying to pretty much everyone.
As for "left leaning", see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870 (Feb 2021). The specific examples are old now but there is an endless fresh supply from each tap.
This is largely an illusion, as can be seen by the number of people complaining in the other direction about how wacko libertarians or MAGA or whatever dominate on here.
What you're actually observing is that HN is one of the more diverse public spaces you participate in and there's no personalized algorithm that filters the content to only show what you want. When your exposure to left-leaning content goes from <10% on an algorithmic feed to ~50% on HN, it feels like being overrun.
Just know that it feels just as overwhelming to the left-leaning people on here, and they will jump to the same interpretation in the opposite direction.
I do think it's OK for some forums - if the community agrees - to say certain topics (like politics) are off limits.
I don't really think it's ok for a community to say discussion about what should be discussed is off limits... or being critical of policies, the bubble, etc...
Your comment is (a) off-topic and (b) smacks of a complaint about not getting enough up-votes. Neither of these areas are looked upon positively in HN. If this style of comment is your modus operandi, it may explain why your work is not well-received, and in short it has nothing to do with the popularity of your opinions.
And this comment of yours I'm replying to will probably get downvoted because it's a complaint about votes that contributes literally nothing to the conversation (in fact, detracts from it).
It's not a complaint. I'm just pointing them out. Without them I couldn't argue my case at all.
"I the noble freethinker, standing bravely against the mob" comments are boring and repetitive, and therefore always off topic.