[benlivengood]

I mean, what sort of reaction are you trying to provoke that is not downvotes? Downvoting is a generally expected result of direct provocation. If an opinion is known to be provocative it usually means there is a wealth of existing discussion about it already where the finer points have been debated, and if a comment doesn't meaningfully add value to that larger extant discussion it'll probably be downvoted.

Speculative opinions are sometimes downvoted for being repetitive or easily Googleable for veracity first. There have been plenty of comments I started, googled in the middle, learned something, and didn't bother finishing.

Is this about covid? Politics? AI/LLMs/transformers? Religion? Vi/Emacs? Those are where I see downvotes. The first one needs pretty nuanced discussion because despite the focus of the world's science the virus is still evolving new variants and there hasn't been enough time for really great peer review and consensus-building on all aspects, and there's a huge political element. I think the political divide between parties in the U.S. is the worst it's been in a couple hundred years, so that will draw out the downvoters for anything controversial. We are going to have to literally vote to further the political discussion/landscape. AI is moving so fast right now that no one is quite sure what is happening and there is a philosophical divide or two over what it means with respect to consciousness, sentience, intelligence, etc.; a mix of covid-level uncertainty with a bit more existential implications and a big helping of YMMV on impact. Religion is mixed both with politics and existential beliefs and so also requires more nuance than provocation or speculation.

Emacs. (This is an example of a downvotable comment; sharing only an affiliation or preference without some contributory nuance or furthering of a conversation)

[version_five]

The original post is about dissenting views though right? I think you nailed the topics, but there's typically a "side" that gets more downvotes, and I think the point is that being provocative is asymmetrical.

[soco]

From what I can tell, the provocative ideas exposed on less than two rows of text are the ones getting downvotes. If I can dissent with a well written text, downvotes come very rarely, if ever. Which tells me dissent is acceptable (here) if it brings a story, proofs, younameit. And dissent for the sake of dissent, less. Which kind of mirrors real life, right?

[revelio]

As someone with sometimes provocative views, providing full citations etc helps but it's easily observed that people who mindlessly promote herd wisdom can simply make comments like "That looks like nonsense" or "That's arguing in bad faith" with nothing else, and yet they don't get voted down.

Unfortunately, votes are meant to be used to judge comment quality but most people use them to try and penalize or reward views they already have regardless of merit. It's easy to get voted up by +100 simply by making snarky low value comments that agree with the current HN vibe, and a long comment with 5 citations will easily sit at 0 or -1 if it's ideologically inconvenient.

[soco]

You said "It's easy to get voted up by +100 simply by making snarky low value comments that agree with the current HN vibe" - are you sure about this, or just imagining it? Because one can only see their own votes and for me I never had this happening.

[revelio]

Yes, absolutely sure. This comment of mine got voted up to 171:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35482810

... and it was just a cheap dunk on Musk. I actually quite like Elon overall, although my shock in that comment is genuine, but since liberals decided he's a traitor to the cause mindless anti-musketry is in vogue.

Normally I post things that go against the zeitgeist, but in that case we happened to align = instant karma.

Whereas, for example, a drastically higher effort comment with five citations showing something unexpected about climatology (e.g. that Arctic sea ice is at the same level right now as it was in 1981) will get +3 at most, possibly -1, quite possibly flagged. Often hard to tell what will happen. I sometimes suspect the absolute number of upvotes is much larger but that they get balanced with a nearly equal number of downvotes.

[benlivengood]

I think it's pretty critical information if there's a collective group of dissenting views on measurable outcomes that correlate with downvotes.

It means they're almost certainly beliefs drawn from a convenient collection of wedge issues used to fight for votes in difficult voting districts (e.g. Battleground States but can be more localized or Federal) in the U.S.

Otherwise you'd expect people to complain that their pet theory of gravity is getting downvotes, or that their pet theory of which editor is better was downvoted. But no, it's collectively the ideas propagated as the major planks of party politics and used to shoehorn voters by district into the cohorts needed to maximize the chances for winning seats for particular party candidates. Individually truth-seeking people don't naturally gravitate towards whole sets of beliefs that just end up mutually incompatible with the set of beliefs of the other half of the country; it requires nudges in specific directions to achieve that. Large groups of people also don't collectively go off into falsehood-seeking together; again it takes specific nudges to achieve the perception that literally the other half of the country is intentionally deluding themselves.

This is a generic argument: imagine if your preferred political party was firmly established at your county, state, and federal level. How much would you really care or feel the need to argue for these most-downvoted dissenting views? Would they take lower precedence to practical things like, say, infrastructure and healthcare and small businesses (both parties love those) and R&D? Would the news cycle fixate on them to the point that they kept coming up for discussion on HN?

The parties don't even care which issues they own so long as they can wield them. Witness the flip-flop of territory (plank and physical land) between Democrats and Republicans beginning in the 1950s with civil rights. They will individually tend toward roughly compatible planks but it's by no means guaranteed. Also, unfortunately, it means that one party is almost guaranteed to drift out of the facts zone and into some weird twilight ideology zone over time; they have to keep the planks in place for utilitarian means (winning elections) so long as they are still effective even if it means actively reinforcing beliefs that are pretty obviously and objectively wrong, while the opposing party can double down on science where needed (but, still, certainly not required or even desired; better to have the flexibility to move back toward ideology if necessary).