Comment by xboxnolifes
8 days ago
I disagree. People will frequently say that downvoting is not for disagreeing, but in every controversial thread dissenting opinions are quickly downvoted and frequently flagged. Some recover, but many die or end up pushed down into obscurity.
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.
I would also argue that shutting certain posts down early is what helps it thrive. Maybe you lose some value of topic but you gain the ability to discuss other things in depth. You also prevent pollution of discourse.
There are over 1,200 comments on this controversial story alone, with plenty of debate within: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43517833
What more evidence do you need that spirited disagreement is alive and well here?
That seems like a pretty mild controversy to me. How many people could even say whether their water has added fluoride?
What kind of evidence would satisfy you, then?
13 replies →
Downvoting for disagreement has always been fine on HN. People sometimes assume otherwise because they're implicitly porting the rules from a larger site, but that's a mistake.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314
It has but I'm not sure this works at the scale HN operates at now. When the community was smaller, the band of opinion was narrower, so the downvote worked better. Now that the community is large I'm not sure if this scales well. Just a thought I've had over the last few years.
Wouldn't that only be true if the vote thresholds are absolute? If the impact of a vote is adjusted based on voters present, it should scale.
> People will frequently say that downvoting is not for disagreeing
Those people are wrong.
Downvoting pushes peoples comments down and greys them out, effectively silencing them. It creates echo chambers.
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.
Your very comment is now downvoted but not silenced. We all see it, as we do every grey comment, as long as one works their way down the comments page. Not every comment is going to be agreed with and rise above the fold, and that’s ok.
3 replies →
>Downvoting pushes peoples comments down and greys them out
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.
>> Disagreement is alive and well on HN.
> I disagree.
Head explodes
I had a whole paragraph that I removed that was to preempt this reply, but I thought it wasn't needed.