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Comment by jnbiche | Hacker News Reader

Who is downvoting all these comments made in good faith? The same thing is happening in other posts on the front page, and elsewhere on this page.

If you downvoted this, you need to go review the HN guidelines [1] and Paul's recent comments on what makes an ideal HN comment [2].

Downvoting is not something you do for a comment you mildly disagree with -- it should be reserved for posts that explicitly violate community standards. This is not one of them, regardless of whether or not you or I agree with the particular sentiment.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445761

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445761

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I do not think it is that straight forward.

> But will it be the "same person"? Does cold-starting from the same neural network give you the same consciousness or a copy? Does consciousness require some form of continuity that's lost if you lower neural activity beyond a certain level?

The sense in which consciousness is used in the comment does not have a commonly held definition to my knowledge.

I would be surprised if the poster is using a personal rigorous definition of consciousness in the comment. I have not see a rigorous well defined definition of consciousness when paired with any question along the lines of "But will it be the same person?

I would say it could fall into:

"Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them."

in the commenting guidelines:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Though it is more of classic for using ill defined words and concepts that people nonetheless hold near and dear.

Though think it is a good police to only down vote a comment like that if the full conversation by the poster continued to use ill defined concepts rather then refining them through out the conversation.

I wonder if changing the downvote button to a "flag" link would be more appropriate for how the button is intended to be used.

I don't think that's a bad idea. However, anyone who has been around here long enough to accumulate 1000 karma (or whatever it is now) should know better than to downvote anodyne comments with which one mildly disagrees.

I think people are getting emotional about certain subjects and lashing out by downvoting any comments that provoke rational discussion on those subjects. In other words, downvoting exactly the kind of comments pg is trying to foster in HN.

This would make a lot of sense. Flagging clearly says "this comment is not appropriate on this site", while downvoting usually means simply "I don't agree with this comment".

Downvoting also means "this comment should be this high", however the problem is that there's o indication when a comment is at score of 1, so people would inadvertently push it into gray area.

There is already a "flag" link available to those with sufficient karma.

Can you quit whining about downvotes? It happens. Just move on. You've made as many posts complaining about losing 10 karma as you have about the topic at hand.

Actually, I made this post before I even posted the other comment that was downvoted. This comment was made solely on the basis of others', not me, being downvoted.

Look, frankly, I've spent a long time here refraining from commenting about random downvotes (of others' productive, non-inflammatory comments -- even ones I disagree with; I rarely get downvoted). But there's been a sea change in downvoting over the last few weeks (I'm doing some quantitative analysis that I'll soon put up). I'm not going to sit idly by while one of the last bastions of rational discussion on the web goes to hell.

Whine about my whining all you want.

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