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by wakawaka28 252 days ago
One person's "outlandishly wrong" is another's "boringly obvious" opinion.

>I think many non-liberal comments that are downvoted here are done so for being in bad faith, because they may have a point but overextend their argument to other targets.

Liberal comments are often in bad faith. The top/only political posts that get upvoted are entire bad-faith liberal propaganda hit pieces. The liberal commenters find a way to wedge politics into anything remotely political, spewing Trump Derangement Syndrome or climate hysteria narratives. These comments get upvoted. Trying to talk sense into these people gets consistently downvoted unless you're willing to do a lot of waffling and phrase your objection in the most milquetoast way you can think of.

>I commonly hear that HN leans liberal and whatnot, and that's probably true, but I wouldn't say that non-liberal (for severe lack of a better term) comments are necessarily dogpiled.

The audience (that comments, anyway) is mostly a liberal hivemind. There is a lot of dog-piling here. You shouldn't be downvoted for simply disagreeing or presenting a reductio ad absurdum argument but it happens here all the time. It's not as bad as Reddit but still not so good. The rate limit sucks too because you can be spammed by like 5 people and not be able to respond to them quick enough.

I might do better if I pretended to be more on the fence than I am, but I am very opinionated. Some of these comments I respond to are SO stupid that I think shock therapy is the appropriate approach. I try not to be personal. I just point out the absurdity of what they are saying and hope they just snap out of it or say something interesting to prove me wrong.

1 comments

Based on that last paragraph, I think it's pretty likely you're getting downvoted for your attitude and not for your opinions.

That's actually pretty consistent with a lot of the other comments I see where the author claims their opinion is being downvoted when they're actually just being a jerk.

> and hope they just snap out of it

Is this something you do a lot? Someone talks down to you online and you go "huh! They're right!" and change your mind?

I'm definitely getting downvoted primarily for my opinions and disagreement. I don't know if you've noticed but people really hate being proven wrong or challenged on their opinions. The default is they treat you like a jerk unless you kiss enough ass, and even then they probably still hate it. If I waffle around and get carpal tunnel from typing out overly polite replies to absurd takes, I might avoid some of the downvotes. But there's no pleasing these people. I wouldn't care so much if not for the hive mind effect, where people like me can't downvote anyone no matter how rude or wrong they are. It creates an illusion of consensus, and reinforces bad ideas.