That's a good point. But let me ask you: do you think HN actually has this problem, i.e. of ideas being suppressed because people disagree? If so, I'd be curious to see examples. Most of the downvoted stuff I see has some other readily available explanation; usually some form of rudeness.
I see it a lot. What's worse is up and down votes are a corrective mechanism.
If you get downvoted, that kinda feels bad, if you get upvoted, that kinda feels good. It shapes your discussion and teaches you the rules of what the community finds acceptable/unacceptable.
What is the honest to god pragmatic result of this policy?
You're training people not to say something others disagree with.
Even if you don't agree with that, downvote to disagree causes pragmatic problems outside of training! Consider a discussion where someone starts off with an unpopular view, and then an interesting discussion happens back and forth between two parties discussing that position. Downvote to disagree hides that discussion.
If so, you should be able to find three examples. Can I please see them? Specifically, three comments that aren't in any way rude, downvoted for expressing an unpopular view?
The reason I'm curious is that I try to watch out for that, yet have only seen one comment recently which seemed to me downvoted purely for expressing an unpopular opinion, and even it was somewhat borderline.
> You're training people not to say something others disagree with.
That's not true if most such comments get more upvotes than downvotes.
I'm not going to go through my whole freaking history to highlight the 5 times I've specifically marked where a downvote to disagree has happened on otherwise civil text.
> That's not true if most such comments get more upvotes than downvotes.
so it's not true were training people to keep unpopular opinions to themselves, because if those opinions will also be upvoted... because why? Because people don't agree with them? What?
It's not about being suppressed in an active way. For the problem I'm talking about, it's completely sufficient for the disagreed-with posts to simply not rise to the top of the discussion.
Remember, HN doesn't even show the vote counts on posts, so you can't extract hardly any agreement-disagreement info from a post (other than it's not so bad as to be downvoted to oblivion). The true and important function of the votes is to control visibility.
Try expressing a conservative or religious opinion. I've gotten downvotes for both even though I haven't been the slightest bit rude. I enjoy hacker news, but at times it can really feel like a hivemind.
