Two HN Announcements

The biggest lost opportunity I find here on HN are not with the comments moderated poorly or that were banned, but with the comments never posted and the discussions that never happened because of harsh anonymous downvoting.

Donwvotes on HN are anonymous and silent. This equates to being slapped in the face by someone with a mask on while you're in the middle of a conversation, without knowing why, and not being able to do anything about it. In a real conversation, disagreeing with someone involves actually opening your mouth and talking to that person, and even then is not rewarded with an immediate punishment to the person you're disagreeing with. This is what leads to a discussion, or better yet, a debate. Instead, the only recourse on HN is to change how you talk or to keep quiet.

But at this point I must assume this is an intentional design decision, and I adjust my tone and substance accordingly. But I wouldn't be writing this if I weren't okay with HN's rules.

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(edit/addendum: this isn't to say there are no discussions or debates on HN... but I hope other's agree there is something uniquely HN about most of them)

I'd say that this has gotten worse over time. I haven't seen as many interesting back and forth discussions on HN for a long time. There are probably a lot of different factors behind that but the rise of downvoting as a means of disagreeing with a comment hasn't helped.

> I haven't seen as many interesting back and forth discussions on HN for a long time. There are probably a lot of different factors behind that but the rise of downvoting as a means of disagreeing with a comment hasn't helped.

There are a few topics I happen to know quite a lot about (e.g. health economics), and I generally enjoy discussing them with people in real life.

I've long since given up on being able to discuss them on HN, however, because it's really demoralizing to write a 1000-word comment with five footnote citations explaining the nuances of the health insurance billing system and labor supply market, only to get downvoted within 30 seconds by people who (presumably) don't like that my comments don't perfectly support their opinions. Rinse and repeat throughout an entire discussion thread.

So instead, on these topics where I know I'll inevitably get downvoted, I just write a single comment, much shorter, and oftentimes without citations. If people respond, I often don't bother to reply. It's not that I dislike debating, or that I dislike debating this topic. But it's a waste of my time to keep writing comments only to get (virtually) slapped in the face every time I hit "submit".

There are other users I've noticed who have followed similar patterns. Which is a shame, because I've learned a lot from them in the past.

Perhaps you've stopped writing them, but I still associate your username with high quality comments. Try not to care too much about the random downvotes, and please keep writing extensive well-footnoted comments about the issues you care about. It's probably a small audience, but we are appreciative.

The problem with that is that you can't not care about them if you care about meaningful debate and conversation.

The effect of downvotes is to push comments down and fade them away into the background. That should be the effect of filtering low-quality comments, but why should that be the effect of disagreement?