This site is becoming more and more like Reddit every day, and it's super sad to me. I don't come here for repeated political arguments and discussion. This is Hacker News, not r/politics.

In fact, I've started searching out gray-text posts because often those seem to be of higher quality than normal black posts. That's a bad sign.

https://news.ycombinator.com/active

because it shows flagged posts. It's not just comments. More or less any story that might attract comments of a conservative bent are immediately flagged, like the recent story about how Twitter is shadowbanning prominent conservatives.

I might go looking for an extension or CSS change to disable the greying out of downvoted comments too. The greying achieves nothing. There's virtually no real spam or abuse on this site, so a grey comment almost invariably means someone made a good point that someone else couldn't refute and didn't want to. They're often excellent posts.

Don't expect it to change. The moderators here like to claim they're unbiased but I've seen very frequent cases where they tick off someone and warn them they'll be banned simply for not agreeing with whatever extremist ideas are coming into vogue in California - but the posts were written politely and made good/logical points. Meanwhile people supporting the opposite position with comments that throw around terms like "nazi", "racist", "trash fire" or whatever are left alone. And of course the blatant flagging of posts or comments simply for their viewpoint is left unaddressed.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22hostile%20media%20effect%22...

I started on HN four and a half years ago. My impression was that, in those days, HN had higher quality discussion. More of it was technical, but even the nontechnical discussion (political, say) was discussed differently. There was more fact- and evidence-based discussion, and less dogmatic assertion of positions. There was more real thought and less reflexive spewing of pre-canned viewpoints.

HN has become a lesser place - more filled with dogmatists (of various flavors), and less with people who can actually change their minds if given real evidence. As a result, the discussion has become less about evidence and data, and more full of strident statements of dogmatic positions, made by people who will happily talk but won't listen.

In that environment, of course you're going to get downvotes from the dogmatists when you question (or worse, contradict) someone's dogma. But is the strident stating of dogma by someone who won't listen itself worthy of downvoting? I'm not sure the answer is no - that's not the kind of "discussion" we want here. On the other hand, it may be reinforcing bad behavior on the part of others, and some of those "others" may be salvageable...

One thing that should always be considered is that maybe the discussion was always bad but you were new at that point too.

1. http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

Unfortunately Slashdot also undid themselves a bit by introducing "Overrated" and "Underrated" which adjusted the score without needing to provide a justification. I always wondered why they did that.

I use the userscript I have linked in my profile to disable the fade for downvoted comments but there's only so much you can do.

And to be fair... there are some subjects for which Hacker News has proven less than capable of maintaining civil discourse, and some subjects like mainstream news and politics which are legitimately off topic. But it would be nice if people learned to just ignore sentiments they both disagreed with and were neither willing or capable of a reply to, and just hid threads they didn't want to participate in.

edit: fun note, we joined HN basically at the same time

Something much more common and harmful to the quality of discussion is dumb stuff getting upvoted. Oddly, you never see anyone meta-fuss about that.

I probably use downvoting similar to flagging. Swearing, cursing, being rude, etc get downvoted.

I once did an experiment. Where I took one of the bottom comments and copied his post word for word minus the part that could be considered rude (with his permission) to see how much one sentence could throw off a comment. It is one of my higher rated comments. I'll have to go back and look it up.

My copy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14395162

Original: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14395046

People will upvote comments they agree with and nobody seems to have a problem with that. The opposite action - downvoting to express disagreement - feels pretty natural.

Slashdot found a reasonable solution to this problem a decade ago and it surprises me that more tech-oriented sites haven't borrowed some of their innovations.

Most users cannot vote on posts.

Posts can reach a maximum of +5 or a minimum of -2.

Users who have reached a certain karma threshold themselves, start being allocated mod points at random. You get given a small allocation of points that replenishes from time to time.

Each mod point you are given can be used exactly once. If you moderate a discussion and then post to it, your moderations are undone but you don't get the points back. This ensures people only moderate discussions they don't want to take part in, i.e. that they don't feel strongly about.

In particular this means that voting on Slashdot is not a way for readers to express agreement.

New users receiving mod points for the first time are sent to a page that explains how moderators are expected to behave and act. It's treated as a responsibility that's earned, not something just anyone can do.

To moderate a comment you must pick a reason from the dropdown: insightful, informative, interesting, funny, troll, flamebait iirc. Each post showed its score and the last justification given. There were also "overrated" and "underrated" which I felt was a flaw in the mod system, as they altered the score but not the last justification (and the two words themselves are too vague to represent a justification). This meant you could get comments scored as +5 Troll, for example, which was pretty funny but ultimately a quirk of the design, not intended.

Moderations are themselves meta-moderated. Many more users are allowed to meta-moderate than moderate. In meta-moderation, the judgements of the moderators themselves are scored. Users are presented with a set of posts and the justification the moderator selected and asked if they agree with it. Moderators that frequently get bad scores from meta-moderation stop being allocated mod points or are given less, and as such are dropped from the pool. If meta-mods agree with your moderations, you can get given more.

You can mark users as "friend" or "enemy" which applies an adjustment to their scores. In this way users who frequently get modded down but you like their posts can be up-scored just for you.

Scores control thread collapse not just ordering. High scored replies to low scored comments are still visible by default.

Anonymous users have post scores that start at 0. Logged in users start at 1. Users with high karma start at 2. In this way users who repeatedly make good comments get rewarded with default higher visibility.

This scheme has many advantages over the typical upvote/downvote mechanism most sites use:

• Moderation is not a simple aol me-too voting system, but genuinely intended to highlight good posts.

• Moderation is not done by the site owners. It's done exclusively by the readers. This acts against groupthink as the site's readers are pretty diverse.

• The system encourages certain kinds of posts, in particular funny posts. Reading Slashdot is/was frankly more enjoyable than reading HN: the commenters were just as smart, and that smartness was often deployed towards being entertaining.

• Abusive moderators that just downvote things they disagree with were flushed out of the system.

A modernised version of Slashcode would be a good thing to have. Its approach to discussion moderation is deeply unappreciated.

But since people are dumb as shit and hoping that they will change is futile, why can't we have a setting that keeps down voted comments black? Since I'm reading HN on my phone, solving that problem with a user style doesn't work. If there was a karma opt-out setting entirely disabling the karma system for comments and all its effects I definitely would turn it on. I'd rather suffer some spammy comments now and then than partaking in Hacker News' dumb karma chasing game.

I can't do much about i), but everyone can do something about ii) by upvoting gray comments if those comments are making a contribution to the conversation.

A few people have got the ability to downvote, but many more people have got the ability to upvote. Those people should start using their upvotes.

What you're noticing isn't new. There have been complaints about downvotes for many years on HN.

I don't think downvoting is getting out of control, but my memory makes it seem like the the ratio of

downvoting for disagreement : downvoting for quality of discussion

has increased over time.

When I crossed the karma threshold for being able to downvote, I mostly adhered to downvoting as an indicator of off topic, irrelevant and trolling content, because I thought that's what HN was about. Then I read Paul Graham's old comment that it's ok and acceptable on HN to downvote as a sign of disagreement, and so I changed my behavior to use it for that purpose too.

I try to lift what look like unnecessarily downvoted comments by upvoting them. I try not to downvote as a knee jerk reaction on things I disagree with, but I don't follow it all the time.

One must also realize that these actions at an individual level don't matter much since karma points on HN are as unpredictable as airline ticket prices (actually, we're getting better at predicting the latter). One downvote is not always -1 karma, just like one upvote is not always +1 karma. My guess is that the graying of downvoted comments (which I dislike for UX reasons) depends on some kind of calculation based on number of downvotes, who downvoted the comment, the recency of the downvotes, and other factors. So one single person should not be able to game the system (even with multiple accounts) — that's the theory. It doesn't look like it works well in practice.

[added] I've noticed that sometimes in a deep conversation between only two commenters -- where they cannot downvote each other -- one of them gets their comments downvoted within a minute of posting or so, suggesting that there are parallel accounts used to downvote as a method of intimidation or retaliation.

Maybe we need something like keeping track of the IP address of downvotes, and seeing if multiple downvotes to the same comment come from the same IP address? Or seeing if two accounts have a strong correlation of downvotes?

Personally, I do not ever downvote, preferring to reply instead, or just ignore.

IMHO, it seems like there are some political activists on HN. It's really discouraging to see smart comments downvoted (into grey) because they offer a political opinion that doesn't sit well with the activists.

HN can be so much better.

Talking about certain people and their decisions in tech is not possible also.

I don't think downvotes are useful inputs, personally. It's far too easy to farm votes and use the accounts for essentially manipulation, it doesn't actually contribute to the dialogue, even when they're down voting something like an overly obvious question or dumb comment, a down vote doesn't really change anything.

I think accounts under 5000 karma shouldn't have dowvoting capability at all. Additionally, once a down vote has been cast on a comment, that post's score should be hidden to discourage multiple downvotes.

Unless someone is spamming or posting something actually harmful or illegal, ie not just an opinion, there's no benefit in discouraging that person from contributing in the site.

These are my thoughts. I've seen HN go from a bastion of intelligent hackers and scholars mature enough to discuss nearly anything to a collection of mostly childish people bickering about nothing. Over the years and different accounts and seeing the wrong people rewarded and the wrong people blasted out for minor errors. It's crazy.

Downvotes are just one angle, but I agree that it needs attention.

Edit: this post now serves to prove the point I'm making.

META: An alternative to this might be to add a meta-moderation system but that has its own share of problems which could be fixed by adding a meta-meta-moderation system; GOTO META

Elsewhere in this thread someone mentioned that downvoting supposedly was meant to be used to indicate dissent while discussing downvotes is explicitly frowned upon. While I agree with the latter I assume the former is incorrect. If the downvote button actually was meant to indicate dissent it might as well be relabelled as the 'Nomenklatura button' as it has the same stifling effect on the community: voicing a dissenting opinion can get you silenced without a chance to discuss.