zlacker

>>lordna+(OP)
I think the HN culture is slowly dying. Reflexive downvoting has become very common as of late, the eternal September is brining in more people steeped in political hivemindedness. That isn’t to say all is lost, but this site feels markedly different from the beginning of the decade.

>>mieser+V4
How do you know that downvoting is "reflexive" - certainly any time I've been downvoted it was, on reflection, fairly well justified.

>>arethu+K5
> certainly any time I've been downvoted it was, on reflection, fairly well justified.

Typically when I find my statements are downvoted it is because I had a quip that could reasonably be construed as negative, combative, etc. I tend to edit and remove those bits.

When I find things to be "reflexively" (probably the wrong word) downvoted, it is in regards to simple questions. Simple example, there was an article regarding Manning's confinement yesterday. One top-level comment asked "Why is this not cruel" to which I asked the opposite, "How is it cruel?" - simple as can be. I watched that one go down to fairly negative, then bounce back up, settling on a score of 0. I don't care about the score itself so much as what that delta represents.

Perhaps I'm just too narrow minded, but I fail to come up with a reason to downvote a simple question asking for perspective that doesn't involve me reading some kind of intent. One of the core tenets of this site is to assume good faith, assume the most charitable viewpoint. When I say that I believe HN culture is dying, it is this that I am talking about. There seems to be less and less good faith discussion as time goes on.

As always, I'd love for an alternative perspective that I'm (probably) missing here.

>>mieser+sx
Regardless of one's political opinions, it seems relatively uncontroversial that answering the question "how is A not X?" with the followup question "how is A, X?" has contributed very little to the conversation. "X", in this case "cruelty", might be a debatable quality, but it isn't as though we have no information about the situation. Google is chock-full of different arguments for and against Manning's various punishments. (No links from me, because that would make my opinions obvious.) If you were genuinely curious, that would have been a place to start.

The original question seems fine as a conversation starter, since for one thing it identifies a particular motivated action that most humans would agree is cruel: 'admittedly imprisoning someone for "coercive" reasons', but if the only responses it had inspired had been more meta-conversation like yours then it would have been suitable to flag the whole subthread. Fortunately there were lots of thoughtful responses.