I find this interesting because I know that karma causes me, anyway, to be cautious in the opinions I voice, since the downvotes are painful to me. I am interested to see people who are brave enough to not give a s%%t about getting downvoted but are still popular overall.
I'm interested in diversity of opinions, not echo chambers, and people who can combine having their own unique point of view that doesn't follow the crowd, as well as still pleasing the crowd a lot of the time are very interesting to me right now.
I'll try it as well.
In fact, I wish there was a voting etiquette described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Nothing too formal, but just a "here's how the community like to use voting tool"
Guidelines are a potential bikeshed. I don't think it's a terrible idea, but be careful what you wish for.
I disagree. It's an overused defence: voicing idiotic opinions is "having a unique point of view"; being rude and domineering is "having an outspoken and blunt demeanour". Your opinions should stand on facts, not your I-don't-give-a-shit attitude. The difference should come from your interpretation of them. Respecting so-called controversial figures leads only to a downward spiral where we encourage bad behaviour.
Hacker news, in my experience, respects different opinions if they carry any weight. A thread on Uber has both who attack and defend Travis Kalanick. Controversial opinions, unfortunately, often means saying groundless shit and later, defending them with "I-am-a-contrarian" attitude.
You need look no further than the largest study of bee populations published this week in Nature to see what I'm talking about. It concludes Roundup is killing the bees, and Bayer comes out and calls the study "inconclusive" because it defies the tobacco science they previously bought and paid for.
And I just know someone is going to post a link from Snopes, confirming Bayer's version of the truth, without investigating any of the underlying science, but will accept Snopes' version of the truth as the actual truth. Because Snopes. Let's not even acknowledge nobody at Snopes has any journalistic nor investigative credentials.
So from the point of view that considers down votes something of a problem, what solution do I see? Nothing really conclusive. I think a step in the right direction is if downvotes only affected the comment they pertained to, and not overall reputation -- then I'd feel a lot more free.
That's a good thing. I don't want to read the same tiresome spats everyday. I would far rather some people just downvoted comments and moved on.
I agree yet look at this completely differently: your opinions should stand on facts, not how you feel about those facts or the tone of the person stating them.
Your opinion implies rationality on the side of society and a lot of other unspoken pre-condition to discurs, which never make it to reality.
The problems is that the HackerNews API (https://github.com/HackerNews/API) only provides a total score for a comment, instead of up and down votes, so you'd have to modify your controversy formula to use an appropriate measure of dispersion instead (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_dispersion).
I'm not a statistician myself, so I can't help further.
Getting downvoted in HN is not very hard. You can mention how Bill Gates is trying to buy a stairway to heaven or that Rust should replace C and you'll get spanked. If you express personnal opinions enough times on a website full of intellectuals you are bound to displease regularly unless you have nothing interesting to say.
It's a good thing. You can't be right all the time. You can't agree all the time. Actually, quite often you won't.
But to be downvoted spectacularly, it's quite easy: promote religion, or borderline sexist/racism allusions and you're it. Doesn't matter if you are right or not.
On the other end you can be pretty much who you want to be. I mean I worked in porn and had only one snarky remark about it during the last years.
The practice of editing [and deleting] of my comments seems to have made my writing better. Writing for myself is easier than writing for an audience. And writing for an audience that expects me to give a shit is harder than writing for the audience that admires people for pretending to not give a shit. And no doubt, this thread illustrates -- as if the rest of the internet did not already provide overwhelming evidence -- that there is a large audience for writing that pretends not to give a shit.
Flame warriors and trolls are the original internet crowd. Not giving a shit is not a unique point of view. It's the default content of all the little internet boxes into which people can type. It's good that downvotes hurt because the solution is writing something better.
Good luck.
He says things and expresses himself in a way, which is in strong violation with social norms and hacker news guidelines. How could that be?
Poe's law and all but sure reminds me of being manic and my word salad speeches. Hope the guy is OK.
The fact that something like that can be achieved by a schizophrenic man who uses the "n-word" in sentences like one uses butter on toast is truly inspirational. TempleOS is an excellent example of so-called "outsider art", but is also a significant technical feat on its own.
In my opinion they need to be replaced with something more decentralized that puts each individual user in control of what kind of comments they want to see and makes them each decide individually.
Imagine if people who everybody disagreed with always got censored? We'd have all sorts of situations where everybody would suffer until things like basic hygiene for physicians were discovered. Oh wait, that already happened and you can read about it here - http://www.medicaldaily.com/mad-scientist-6-scientists-who-w...
Online systems are so much more fluid than real-life and we have a good opportunity to change the way things are done, but unfortunately the biggest sites for conversation all follow the same brain-dead upvote/downvote system. I hope that one day we'll have a better system which at least lets individuals choose their own moderator or moderation style.
(Not everything he says triggers these reactions, but it's entertaining when it does.)
> I was a frequent reader and contributor to Hacker News since 2007,
> but got hellbanned[1] in 2012 for complaining about the mystery-
> moderators constantly changing submission titles for the worse.
I think they're operating from a definition of "clickbait" that includes anything that makes a headline appealing, including any sort of pun or metaphor. There's nothing wrong with changing "Ten reasons MySQL is better than PG–and how switching may safe your Data". But it should be done sparingly, and default to respecting that the headline is also creative work, and deserves a bit of respect.
The worst example was http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5139. Halfway through, the post reveals that the author had a heart attack. Not mentioning it in the title was quite obviously a literary choice.
HN changed the headline, before changing it back, to something like "Jason Scott had a heart attack"
(but I guess I better shut up now :). I'd also like to mentioned that, with dead_posts=on, I've come across some seriously above-and-beyond work by dang. Just recently he was basically giving therapy to some guy posting wild rants in low-contrast posts at the bottom of some thread. )
I like his moderator transparency, downvoting explanation scheme, and overall approach to the site. Seems to be quite run quite differently than HN/Reddit
I thought first they were smart and it was funny to understand what wwould made you upvoted/downvoted.
Then I understood it was plain propaganda/censorship whether you were taking an opinion refuting the godliness and virtues of VC/startup/entrepreneur.
HN is the modern pravda except it is liberal instead of being sovietic.
Same shit
There are other people who are "topically controversial", e.g. people who have a background in HFT getting downvoted on every HFT thread, and so on.
Why?