Comment by infecto
3 days ago
It’s a trope and easy to say but I do find the voting system in HN to have gone downhill over the years. It’s very similar to other social media sites. People are polarized about everything, if you have a different opinion, downvoted, if you have a response that might be factual but one of the professional posters here does not like it or you, downvoted.
I will make a benign question and it will instantly get downvoted which to me is against the spirit of HN.
I've experienced the same and have always been of the mind that voting systems on aggregate sites are anti-discussion and promote brigading. When people see a highly upvoted or downvoted comment, the tendency seems to be to follow the actions of those before you. Things quickly turn into an echo-chamber, although Reddit is admittedly more prone to that than HN, since it's divided into topic-specific subreddits.
Still, I'd be fine if the voting system were eliminated and threads were managed chronologically, keeping flagging for obvious rule violations, of course.
This is all, of course, tangential to the post at hand, but that's part of the beauty of it, in my opinion. Start on one topic, end up on something different.