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I normally think pg has been very reasonable in his views, but his historic approval of downvoting things merely to signal disagreement, or worse, being triggered by a word, is a mistake, this norm makes HN much less useful. It chills speech to the point of not being able to suggest correct solutions to things, or correctly diagnose problems. Well, I refuse to participate in that. I only downvote if I think the quality of a comment is bad, it is completely off-topic or absurd for example, or in bad faith. Not if I disagree with it and certainly not because it contains — gasp - a word for a technology I would prefer not to see discussed! And I also refuse to be bullied into silence by some downvotes. I am saying that downvotes within 4 seconds is not likely to be organic, because it requires someone to have refreshed the page at nearly the exact time I posted, magically scroll down to the exact comment, read it first and downvote it. And then 4 downvotes in quick succession after. There is more going on here, I suspect, than mere “losing the plot”. I could attempt to test this by posting comments with the ahem blacklisted word as a reply to some comments even further down the page, where it would be absurd for someone to scroll to that exact comment within, say, 10 seconds. But I have noticed that a specific set of words seems to produce that effect on HN. |
I'll stop you right there. You were downvoted because you were wrong, not because, - gasp - you used a certain word.
I'm a cryptographer. I'm not afraid of cryptocurrencies. I'm afraid of snake oil salesmen that sell things they don't understand.
> And I also refuse to be bullied into silence by some downvotes
K, well, I have no idea what this means. It's not bullying to downvote a wrong opinion.
I've been wrong lots of times. It's not a big deal...