Which is IMHO why the simplistic upvote / downvote / likes / retweet system is one of the major faults of most social networks. It encourages groupthink and tribalism and discourages engagement with other opinions and perspectives. (EG: Don't like an opinion or statement? Just downvote. Don't even try to engage or understand where the other person is coming from.)
That's definitely not why I post on HN and i think its terribly useless to hold universal positions on what motivates people. "Speak for yourself" and all that.
No-one will lie on their deathbed wishing they'd scored more points in the Internet popularity contests.
However, I observed my remarks receiving a hidden downweighting following moderator action some time ago. dang confirmed since that they have a "penalty box" mechanism.
I post less frequently as a result, because I think fewer people will see what I have to say.
Forget hidden. I've noticed that within two minutes of every comment I make, even if they eventually end up positive, I get hit with 3-6 downvotes. Almost as if there's a bot.
> This chronic downvoting on HN is getting boring.
> Not only that - respected HN citizens need to create new throwaway accounts on order to speak their mind. It's becoming a new normal. That's ridiculous.
> it's tiring to express your opinion here and contribute to a conversation only to have it downvoted because it wasn't the right contribution.
The problem is that the "penalty box" mechanism doesn't distinguish between unpopular but well-reasoned opinions and offensive behavior. People here, like in many other online forums, are all-too-quick to downvote other opinions. This is particular stark in discussions around characters like Elon Musk, where for years criticisms were downvoted and flagged (and only recently has it become safe to comment negatively on the behaviors of Tesla and Musk)
The Reddit model (including HN) is inherently bad. Being downvoted for proposing a contrarian opinion is not a good model for discussion. I say this as someone with a moderate (small) amount of karma here.
If you value minority opinions more than what the hivemind thinks, the reddit model is inherently broken. The merit of the traditional forum model is that you can't suppress minority opinions - they are always there to read (unless removed by a mod). No downvoting, no flagging, no "dead" posts that are too negative to show up.
The SA model (pay $5 to register, if you are violently breaking the rules you get banned and you have to pay another $5 to unban your account) is massively better. It funds moderators. It funds server bills. It puts a direct pricetag on being a fucktard. It does not suppress dissenting opinions.
Lots of people will hate it. The quality of posting will also improve. Grandfather everyone who posts here in, ban them if they are fucktards, the quality of posting improves.
It's bad on the small scale of say like a post, but I think it works on the larger scale of the community at large.
If you make a post and it goes into negatives not because you're being an ass, but because it just goes against the groupthink, whatever. Your overall karma will go down a touch. There comes a point where no one post is going to devastate your overall standing.
But if every post you make gets downvoted, isn't that indicative of a larger problem?
But that's looking at the problem solely from a "user" perspective.
It's still bad from a content perspective because it means good, relevant content that goes against the groupthink gets buried.
I have noticed a greater preponderance of downvoting in recent months as well. However I've attributed that to the growing influence of Reddit, a forum in which brigading is common, voting is less about noise cancellation and more about memetic conformance, and where people will downvote if they disliked your punctuation or are simply having a rough morning.
Yes, that’s how all major social networks work. Despite everyone knowing it’s dumb, it still works. They don’t mean anything except they do because people feel they mean something.
And most "scientific studies" that show up in such communities these days are at best only weakly supported, and may all but fall apart at the first sign of someone trying to validate their data integrity or replicate their results. Given the choice between someone sitting in a lab somewhere, maybe running computer models all day vs. the observations of someone who is pretty much hands-on, out in the field every day (like say a fisherman), who do you think I'm generally going to give the benefit of the doubt to?