Hackernews is living proof. Pre-election, you could voice a contrary opinion here and have a discussion. Post-election, even the faintest wrongthink shibboleth gets silently downvoted into oblivion.
Hackernews is predominantly right wing & conservative.
People with strong views simply notice the comments they dislike much more strongly. And sometimes they pass around links to their friends to 'prove' it—which proves nothing, of course, but does strongly reinforce their perception. Once reinforced, these perceptions seem not to change.
On HN the divisions are exacerbated by this being so international a community. Only a third, last I checked, is in the US, and only a small minority in SV. So what we're all encountering here is not just polarization in the US, but much disagreement across national and cultural divides.
p.s. Unless I'm mistaken about the account, we didn't ban you. Nor have we shadowbanned accounts for years (except new accounts that appear to be trolling or spamming). When an account has been around for a while, we tell people we banned them.
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Edit: while I'm thinking about this...
Subtler factors exacerbate these perceptions too. HN isn't siloed—we have no subreddits, no following/blocking—just one big place where everyone sees the same things. Because of that, we're all more likely on HN to encounter comments from people we don't normally mix with, except perhaps on the battlefield. Reading what the 'other side' posts is not fun; it's painful. It gets right in your face and feels like being attacked. It seems to take only a few cases of this before it overflows into one's image of the site itself.
That association makes sense emotionally: I come to this place, I feel pain and anger, therefore this is a hateful place. But it's also just what one would expect from the numbers, which is why the reaction is so clockwork-reliable, as I said above. The people with opposite views to yours are feeling just the same anger and pain.
We see this not only about politics, but about programming languages, large companies, one's own work, and everything else people feel strongly about. We're all in one of those tricky spots where human feelings and statistics don't go well together, and for the most part don't realize it.
I don't post comments on HN to stir the pot. I post comments on HN in the hope of getting other perspectives. A comment with a downvote and a reply is more valuable than a comment with upvotes and no replies. It's not like I can redeem HN points for cash and prizes.
I think I can do an OK job of not being an asshole, but I honestly have no idea what is or isn't going to piss people off or classify as flamebait here. So, if those are the stakes now, I will just have to accept my place on the shitlist.
We’ve got to figure our way out of this, all around. Even more so to tackle issues like those addressed in the submission and so clearly on display in this thread as well. An early comment lamented the current situation:
> ”Hopefully we're still at the point where we can sensibly discuss a WSJ article.”
Well, maybe not it we just complain about it rather than making contributions that make the situation better. Of course it’s important to note that there’s an issue. (Bad analogy imminent!) Bug reports are necessary. At the end of the day we’ve got to dig in and fix those bugs and close the tickets, and make the system more robust.
A confounding twist with the system we’re working on makes it hard for us to disentangle beliefs from behaviors. It’s too easy to conflate the bad behavior of those we disagree with from their beliefs. And sometimes they are guilty of bad behavior. And we also need to realize that we ourselves might be guilty of behaving badly, and work on improving that so we can be more effective in understanding and be understood.
And I’ve increasingly tried to keep in mind that there are some games we play to win, and others we play to keep playing: Discourse in the small and society in the large is most definitely the latter. The goal is not to defeat our opponents, however they may be defined: it’s to figure out how to effectively make the game better. And like any rule change, everyone needs to be persuaded that the new rules are are a good idea.
I encourage you to work on some of the open tickets. Pull requests welcome!
(Thanks for your patience. Please accept the analogies only as far as they work and are useful.)
I wish that there were some sort of metamoderation system. I downvote the mods whenever they post about abusing their power, but I don't know if that even has an effect, or if moderators' posts are immune from downvotes.
Edit: you're right about account karma. When it gets negative enough, comments get killed by software, which is close enough to shadowbanning that it would look the same externally. That case is rather rare and I forgot about it.
It's been around a long time, but I guess it's a bit fiddly? I'm not sure why other sites haven't adopted similar processes.
Oh, that's interesting, I would have thought 2/3 or more. I'd be fascinated to see a breakdown by country; is there one online somewhere? [looks] Ah, there was one in 2011. Maybe I could do one of those polls 'What country do you live in', doesn't seem to be a recent one.
ps I didnt stay long at all on Quora or the StackExchanges, from the amazingly inept modding. Here it's awesome, inspiring even. Thank you!