[jackvalentine]

> I think refraining from posting due to fear of downvotes is a massive disservice to HN. People should be exposed to views of all kinds. It wouldn't be very interesting if we all agreed.

No evidence for this, but I think more commonly people refrain from posting because if you have a controversial opinion you don’t get one thread of posts to reply to suddenly everyone piles on and you’re “discussing” it with 50 different people.

This is a fundamental flaw in link aggregator style social media where the community is large.

[matheusmoreira]

I've certainly experienced that. Depending on the complexity of the replies, I'll either reply to everyone or choose one of them to respond to.

[jackvalentine]

Yeah I’ve experienced it myself, and am aware that I am often on the other side too…

It’s debilitating to have people throwing their 2c in to a growing tree thread and bounce! At least with linear vbulletin forums of old people would have to scroll past the conversation or look like idiots when they reply something totally out of context.

[matheusmoreira]

I think we've all done it at some point. It's usually a low hanging fruit phenomenon. Someone posts something with an obvious mistake, lots of people notice it and proceed to point it out at nearly the same time. Between refreshes of the page, it looks like you're the first one replying. Most vivid memory I have of this is someone here inadvertently telling the creator of the D programming language he didn't know enough C to comment.

> At least with linear vbulletin forums of old people would have to scroll past the conversation or look like idiots when they reply something totally out of context.

Alternatively, they'd recreate threads via extensive quoting, leading to massive in-line quote trees... Socializing is a messy affair no matter what we do, I guess.