[ImPostingOnHN]

I didn't vote either way until you edited your post to add the meta comment. I don't like posters discussing moderation of their posts (I find that discussion about themselves to be vain and distracting from the topic), and I feel gross and off topic myself talking about it even now.

The chrome thing sounds cool.

[fluoridation]

I didn't comment about the voting itself, I asked what was wrong with my comment. There's a difference between "oh, I'm getting down-voted, this sucks" and "what's wrong with what I said?" The former is whining, while the latter invites discussion. If telling someone else what you think about their comment counts as "meta" discussion and is therefore boring then that kind of kills the purpose of a discussion forum.

[throwaway892238]

The strange taboos of ingroups

[ImPostingOnHN]

To be fair, the guidelines[0] request of us:

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Which, yeah.

[0] – https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[WhackyIdeas]

Maybe one day HN will realise that giving the ability to downvote is pretty pointless and needlessly open to abuse.

That negative ability just promotes negativity itself and a bloody pia when I am reading a greyed out message because I am too stubborn to go into the settings and change defaults - so I just steam on thinking HN are using a relic of an ideology.

[throwaway892238]

It's an ingroup reinforcement method.

If you're part of a cult, and you're not allowed to eject someone from the cult, you can at least ignore them or walk away from them when they talk to you, if you don't agree with what they say/do. It's a way for the members of the cult to reinforce the ingroup's behaviors without having overt power over the group. For other people watching this behavior, it reinforces the need to align themselves with the larger group, to avoid the same fate.

The first rule of fight club is you don't talk about fight club.

[ImPostingOnHN]

You're just describing the behavior of every society ever.

I'm not sure where some folks got the idea that they could say whatever they wanted in whatever community they wanted and not expect any reactions, but that's clearly an inhuman expectation. I'm guessing that attitude is a byproduct of internet commenting.

I guess you could call society an "ingroup" or a "cult" like you're doing. It technically fits the definition. It also gives you a convenient victim complex to wave about whenever you feel like people aren't agreeing with you enough. But let's be honest: not every social pariah is a Galileo.

[throwaway892238]

Not really. Society is a broad concept, which contains many different concepts, two of which are ingroup and outgroup. It's a complex topic, but suffice to say that within the concept of ingroup, there are some common behaviors specific to certain kinds of groups, but not all of them. Much like with EQ, if you learn about the tendencies of humans in social groups, you can learn to manage your own behavior to resist falling into common traps. But those who don't learn about them are often subject to them, with unfortunate effects.

As to your assertion ("idea that they could say whatever they wanted in whatever community they wanted and not expect any reactions"), I don't think I or anyone else said that or suggested it. Sounds like a sweeping generalization designed to reinforce an opinion you want to believe. But it also seems like you drank the kool-aid a while back, so I'm pretty sure I can't influence your opinion.

[fluoridation]

>I'm not sure where some folks got the idea that they could say whatever they wanted in whatever community they wanted and not expect any reactions

Usually, historically, if you said something someone didn't like you could expect the person to either confront you directly, or to silently change their opinion of you and possibly change their behavior, perhaps to your detriment. Even before the Internet existed, there was something else someone might have done, which is to send you an anonymous note reading "fuck you". No argument, no way to reply, nothing but a cheap gratuitous offense that serves no purpose other than upset the person who receives it. I argue that downvoting a comment you don't like is equivalent to that.