> People that complain their opinions aren't getting fair treatment are very rarely worth listening to, regardless of position. I prefer a better signal-to-butthurt ratio.
Downvoted comments are subject to being greyed out here, which is a stigma. Yes, it happens. The downvote in a political story has such a different meaning than downvotes in other stories. I feel like people use them as an agree/disagree vote in political threads, whereas they serve as an informed/uninformed vote normally.
This is exactly why people are compelled to speak up politically in every space they can. You are not affected by the policies other people are afraid of and you feel slightly inconvenienced by talk of them and want talk swept under the rug. Whereas the other side says "we cannot sweep this under the rug because of how important it is to our well being."
That's the rub: political disagreements tend to go beyond facts and into the realm of values, at which point it's no longer a matter of informedness. This phase change in the debate can be hard to detect, as even the debaters might not realize they are no longer arguing from facts (since their deeply held values may 'feel like facts'), but IMO it's the reason political discussions tend to decay in quality at a certain point, because one side is no longer honoring the previous terms of the debate, knowingly or not.
For what it's worth, I think political debates on HN are worth having and can be very productive, because my subjective sense of the HN population is that a higher percentage of us are open to reevaluating our beliefs (and potentially our values) in the face of new information than the human population at large.
Also, yes, in a strongly charged political thread, up and downvotes are used very differently (compared to the wide variety of ways people use up/down otherwise, definitely not just "un/informed", take a breath and a step back and you can see that). I've seen it, and it seemed mostly there was wild voting going on, and if it changes the meaning in any sense, only to make the votes less meaningful, so just don't worry about it.
I've personally seen maybe two of those threads, cause as a non-US citizen I don't have much of a beef in it. I think stuff like that is what prompted this detox-week.
But from what I saw, the up/downvotes really went both ways. I know for sure, because that's when I realized the voting was going wild, reasonable comments on both sides voted in to greyness.
BTW the recent discussions about the new Macbook being sufficiently "Pro" or not, followed pretty much the same pattern and I'd love to have a detox week for those as well.
edit: Hey. So, we were explicitly not talking about our personal political points of view, but just about dealing with opposing views and reactions there on. Now I see you're getting greyed out. While I'm getting mad upvotes (you guys). Can we maybe agree that it's maybe perhaps not the political points of view that make the difference here, but rather the earlier-mentioned S2B ratio?
Whether personal or no, submarining comments simply because people disagree with them has always struck me as an intellectually awful "feature". I mean, think about that. People are actively encouraged to effectively censor comments simply because they disagree. What else can that do but encourage a pernicious group-think?
In fact, we should be doing the opposite: if it's stimulating discussion we want, then people should be encouraged to upvote well-made points, even if they don't agree with them.
And, if there's a downvote at all, then it should be for poorly constructed arguments that don't contribute to the quality of the discussion.
Edit: Looks like the two of us have discussed this before :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12974834
And both times I've appreciated the civil discussion. Thanks for that!
Most importantly, this change was made before dang became moderator, to try and fix certain ways the community worked, and nearly all of those ways have changed a lot because of the changes in moderation, so I wouldn't mind seeing that decision to be revisited. I doubt that'll happen though, it's just too safe and easy not to show vote numbers.
As for actual greying, I dislike the fact that it makes reading harder very much. If some people have downvoted it, doesn't mean I don't want to read it. For the same reason I have 'showdead' on in my profile settings (I really wonder how many people have this btw), also because (as I have explained in older comments of mine) I am very much against the concept of hellbanning as it is applied on HN. Again only last week I saw a few 'dead' accounts posting just reasonable (not super-informative or upvote-worthy, but just "fine") comments. Checking their post history I could see some "bad" comments that surely deserved all the downvotes they got, that probably triggered the hellban, but that doesn't excuse in any way to waste these people's time like that, writing reasonable comments, thinking they are participating in conversation, unknowing that the large majority of users won't even see their posts. There's no justification for that, if they need some kind of lasting sanction, have them be notified about it, maybe a posting timeout or something.
What would be better if comments with a certain number of downvotes would auto-collapse, like Reddit does. Even better, adjust the threshold per subthread so the total number of visible direct replies is between 10 and 15, or some number. I'd have locally scripted this myself a long time ago if the downvote-numbers were available.
However, you also seem to have a problem with the greying that it's signalling "unpopular opinion!" to other users, if I understand your remark about "stigma" correctly. Meaning that even if it didn't hamper legibility, if they used a different colour or perhaps a sad smiley in various states of desperation (I dunno), you'd still find a problem with that? Cause I'm not very concerned about that at all. IMO, the signal is the message, like say your posts in this thread, came off to me as somewhat whiny, regardless of the actual opinions in your post history that you were complaining about getting downvotes (which I still haven't looked at, btw, but I'm not sure I would want to), that kind of tone signals a lot stronger to me, downvotes or no, grey or no, opinion that I agree with or no. But maybe once you manage to take downvotes less personally, this particular side of the issue will become less of a concern for you as well.