China

You're being downvoted for expressing a contrarian viewpoint.

This kind of censorship isn't even targeting hate speech, and it drives me crazy. Why downvote them?

Because he's criticizing liberals and most people on HN are liberals. Most censorship ("hate speech" included) is code for shutting your political opponents up. HN makes this really easy by making comments hard to read by removing contrast with the background as they get voted down; post something too much against the grain and it'll get flagged and hidden by default. When you hand users the power to shut those with whom they disagree up, it will inevitably be abused.

Paul Graham:

I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.

It only becomes abuse when people resort to karma bombing: downvoting a lot of comments by one user without reading them in order to subtract maximum karma. Fortunately we now have several levels of software to protect against that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

Paul Graham:

I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

It's not censorship, censorship would be 'dang doing it.

I downvoted him because what he said isn't true.

I think the whole voting thing is stupid. It obviously leads to censorship. Someone else's opinion should not count less than others even if you don't agree with them. Assuming we're not talking about plain spam (bots, ads, etc). Graham did not think this through properly. Everyday I come across comments that are downvoted or flagged and can see no reason why that was done apart from subjective ones.

Of course, there's a lot of subjectivity. But if you think you can make a site like HN be interesting without voting, you should give it a try. It would be an order of magnitude easier and cheaper to operate, and that would be a real innovation.

Problem is, it doesn't just attach a "score" to a comment. The UI will gradually hide comments as they are voted farther down; I've seen many that are barely legible. Flagging also hides comments by default. I can't tell you how many reasonable, well-thought out points I've seen that I have to highlight with the mouse to actually read. I wouldn't even see many insightful comments had I not logged in and enabled "showdead".

There is a great deal of difference between giving users the tools to express disagreement and giving them the tools to block out the opinions of those with which I disagree.

Finally, quoting Paul Graham isn't really an argument. Fine, it's his site, but I'm allowed to say I disagree with how the voting on his site is implemented.

> most people on HN are liberals

"There is a definite right-libertarian bias on HN" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21432833

"If you go against any kind of socially conservative or libertarian perspective it will get down voted and very likely flagged" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20643695

"chilling effect on discourse from leftists" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20804464

"a leftist can't have a sane discussion on this website" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15926162

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=13110004&sort=byDate&prefix&pa...

It's not censorship. Dang did great job and the rules of HN is quite good if not perfect.

The downvote really suppressed free speech. I agree with you on that part. But that's the reality everybody need to accept.

If a comment is faded, you can click on its timestamp to go to its page, where it should be in the regular readable black.

social (left|right) != economic (left|right). But you know that.

Sure, but I think our points are missing each other. Mine is that claims of HN's ideological bias are notoriously in the eye of the beholder. Once people run into a few things they dislike—which is inevitable—they imprint on the idea that the community is biased against them. There's nothing objective about it, and all sides do it. I wouldn't say all users do it, but I suspect the more ideologically committed you are, the more you are likely to. That is, it depends on the magnitude of one's ideological vector, but not the direction. I wrote about this yesterday if anyone cares: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21577584

Hi, thanks for the words, I just wanted to get it out, upvotes or downvotes don't bother me.

I also understand that this may not apply to other people's experience in the Silicon Valley, thererfore I said that your mileage may vary.

The bigger question is - Why should we allow Chinese nationals in America (even more so in Australia) to supress free speech and promote CCP ideals? Its one thing to do it inside China, a whole another level to spread it across the world as immigrants.

The secret about contrarian viewpoints is that they tend to be less supported by obvious evidence, which means there's a confounding factor of being downvoted for expressing a poorly-reasoned viewpoint.

For extreme examples: "I don't vaccinate my kids because I don't want them to have autism" is both contrarian and sort of actively disproved by evidence, so downvoting on the latter grounds is entirely reasonable. If you want to run a worthwhile discussion site, the discussions have to be meaningful to discuss. "The open-source movement is a mistake and the world would be better served by changing the Open Source Definition" is a contrarian, unpopular opinion, but there isn't clear evidence either way as to its merit (among other things, it's more of a straight-up opinion than a report of facts), so it's worth discussing, and shouldn't be downvoted just for being contrarian.

The comment above mostly made testable claims about Silicon Valley's culture. "I feel like the SJWs have gone too far" is an opinion. "People cannot criticize the Chinese government in lunchrooms" is a claim that can be proven or disproven.

Some mentally challenged people actually downvoted you it seems. I have thought about alternatives for a few months now actually. And I admit it's not easy.