> > It's bad enough that people are downvoted for contrarian opinions
> That particular disease doesn't seem to have taken hold here yet. Comments that are downvoted below 1 more often are angry, abusive, trollish, or devoid of content.
Some of the comments voted below 1 are, indeed -- but a more relevant metric to respond to that critic would be: How many well articulated contrarian opinion expressed on HN are voted above 1? There are other, less draconian ways, to avoid abuse. The one chosen here would do that, and more -- too much if PG, YC and HN goals remains to take more risk. My impression of actively commenting for the past month is that contrarian opinions are already extremely unwelcome, while passive-agressive abuse roams.
The most striking aspect I can see is how consistent almost all comments are: I’d made the same reproach to TED, or any ‘democracy’ without a scandal. Everyone agrees that MtGox are clueless and ill-intended, women founders are too few because female hackers are, Musk is a hero… I believe that too, to be honest. But it feels like too little surprises to my taste. I like being wrong; I rarely change my mind on HN, certainly not in the comment sections. Comments are great for the moment if you want implementation details, gritty bug fixes and it’s fine in a community of doers where thinkers aren’t the priority.
The only recent examples that I can give -- because I only have access to number for those -- are my own comments. I get 5 or more points for saying something obvious that I know most of HN agrees with and knows; I get nothing for saying something original, or based on my own exclusive work; I get downvoted for challenging (with an argument line and question marks all along) what I consider to be… local bias. That’s often under the guise of being negative, while I clearly offer constructive solution. I don’t really expect upvotes for the later kind, just response that don’t miss my point.
Fair 'nuff. FWIW, HN has always been like that on some subjects, for as long as I've been a user here. But, the echo-chamber problem might have gotten worse lately, since some key people have fled the site.
It's tough to draw many conclusions from reactions to just a few comments. There are too many variables: tone, time of day, subject matter, who happens to be browsing the site at that time. And people can suffer from argument fatigue, even if it's a totally civil debate.
So I'm not yet convinced that this will be a huge problem for contrary opinions, and if such a problem already exists, this change might even fix it a little by removing some of the noise that's distracting people from better comments.
We are back to my original point (and, really as a statistician ‘Data’ scientist what has been my main focus for the last 15 years), poorly expressed by the story about the guy searching for his keys where there’s light, not where he lost them:
You can’t make progress by using exclusively your archives. You need to imagine how people from whom you haven’t heard anything make decisions.
‘The community has always agreed on most points’ (“HN has always been like that”) and ‘there is no problem for contrarian opinions’ (“I'm not yet convinced that this will be a huge problem”) should be considered violently contradictory statements. That policy might not make things worst because there has never been that much discussion -- but it won’t fix the reason for bad comments which are usually two-fold:
* people don’t know how they could phrase one (I’ve turned every one of “Aha-ha! You are dumb…” into a more insightful questioning dozens of times on other sites.);
* contrarian feel excluded, powerless, and react poorly or violently. I would love to see Hacker News clarify if it is the internal communication tool of Y Combinator, or the leading source of hacker-focused information on-line. Any reader who isn’t a US resident feel disempowered by this contradiction, for instance (and don’t give me the ‘but there are non-US applicants…’ that is the equivalent of ‘But I have a black friend…’)
...alright. I'm 9 days back in your comment history at this point, and I have no idea how to proceed without potentially igniting a flame war.
But, I don't think your comment history is a good example of, "downvoted or ignored for posting high quality contrarian opinions".
Some of your comments are critical of startup culture, but "ahahahahaha no try again" wouldn't exactly be a net loss for HN if it never got published to the site.
If you think I'm missing something important, let me know.
> That particular disease doesn't seem to have taken hold here yet. Comments that are downvoted below 1 more often are angry, abusive, trollish, or devoid of content.
Some of the comments voted below 1 are, indeed -- but a more relevant metric to respond to that critic would be: How many well articulated contrarian opinion expressed on HN are voted above 1? There are other, less draconian ways, to avoid abuse. The one chosen here would do that, and more -- too much if PG, YC and HN goals remains to take more risk. My impression of actively commenting for the past month is that contrarian opinions are already extremely unwelcome, while passive-agressive abuse roams.