[rewqfdsa]

This thread is the most depressing thing I've read on Hacker News in months. I completely agree with you, dogma1138. You and I appear to be only ones who don't view the world through justice-colored glasses and who understand that attempting to enforce strict ideological conformity is self-defeating.

[tptacek]

You should read the news more. This is not the most depressing thing to happen in months by a long stretch. Maybe you'd have an easier time getting over simple disagreements with other people if you, you know, got some perspective.

[dogma1138]

Most people tend to stay away from such threads as they will quickly get downvoted and flagged and will either be buried like most comments on this post that or will be deleted like some of the early comments here that got stomped over. People tend to downvote comments that they do not agree with (regardless of HN rules) which leads to either self censorship (not commenting in the first place or deletion of comments that get a few down-votes) or actual censorship as comments which get downvoted to -10 get buried by the HN system.

[DanBC]

> (regardless of HN rules)

Please can you show me the HN rule that tells people how to downvote? Specifically, the rule that tells people not to downvote for disagreement?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

> I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392347

> Downvoting has always been used to express disagreement.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658691

> IIRC we first had this conversation about a month after launch. Downvotes have always been used to express disagreement. Or more precisely, a negative score has: users seem not to downvote something they disagree with if it already has a sufficiently negative score.