Just curious if anyone here, particularly the older guard, have found a pattern of A) Going against the grain on an issue and then B) being targeted with downvotes for pretty much anything else you post for a while after?
But I recently submitted a link containing an uncomfortable truth from Pew Research titled "U.S. has world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent households".
It got 30 upvotes in one hour, and quickly reached the front page. It seemed to have gotten shadowbanned by a moderator, as it disappeared to the 5th page despite its quickly gained popularity. It was not flagged, or at least not normally as it would show "[flagged]". I suspect someone with special powers demoted it for whatever reason.
This was the post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26100329
But no, having your tally of meaningless internet points decrease isn’t really getting “cancelled”. If downvotes here make you sad, stop looking at them or go do something fun instead. You aren’t going to be uninvited to speak at conferences or lose you job because your HN score goes down.
I have seen this happen many times and have wondered the same thing. It is within the within the rights of whoever runs this site, but I not sure why they believe it would be required... if that is what is happening.
When you're flagged dead, you effectively disappear. This is wrong in my opinion.
Recent post about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25922311
Proposed explanation of why this mechanism is so reliable: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_media_effect
Past, probably too snarky, explanations by me: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Edit: here's what I mean about examples going both ways. In this corner:
"overrun by fascist trolls", "bubble of ignorance and right-wing terrorism", "mostly middle class white male libertarians", "chilling effect on discourse from leftists", "definite right-libertarian bias", "Dang has gone to great lengths to ensure that only far-right [etc.]", "Anything critical of the far-right tends to wind up flagged", "The moderation and users here definitely skew far more conservatively", "cesspool of terrible far-right ideas", "Nazism is pretty popular on HN", "HN has had a problem with bigotry and white supremacy for a long time", "a forum made up of primarily right wing users", "very CLEARLY pro white supremacist", "forbids saying anything against the R Party", "commentary which questions capitalism or america is verboten", "Non libertarian views are not tolerated", "a very specific techno-libertarian Silicon Valley type outlook", "excessively pro-capitalist and woefully dismissive of social justice", "utterly filled with alt-right scum", "overly capitalist ideological Silicon Valley moderation", "the hivemind's right-leaning, libertarian political mindset", "rampant right-wing / libertarian / crypto-fascist", "insurrection apologists in your disgusting community", "HN is a right wing cesspool", "HN as a whole has a conservative tilt", "right-libertarian-leaning HN", "leans right-wing politically, under the guise of being apolitical", "has HN ever been anything other than right-leaning?", "HN has always been pretty far to the right", "entirely filled with right-wing to far-right sheltered techbros", "You simply cannot criticize capitalism", "Can you imagine the kind of slime this forum is managed by?"
and in this corner:
"HN socialist apologia", "the mods are SJW", "socialist-leaning mods" ,"Hacker News the SJW Hole", "you can't be anti-liberal here", "radical leftists appear to have taken control", "tends to be more liberal so you will be downvoted", "a liberal echo chamber identical to all other social media", "this SJW cesspool", "it's ALWAYS the case in HN that any opinion that's not 100% politically correct && strictly SJW standard compliant is suppressed", "HN in turn, are left leaning, socialist Democrats", "you fucking insane sjw", "leftist filter bubbles", "left-wing propaganda", "leftist totalitarianism prevalent on HN", "anti-western and extremely anti-capitalist", "Dang is a totalitarian liberal thought policeman", "banned every single prominent right winger", "extremely left-winged", "most people on HN are liberals", "socialist hell-hole", "this site leans left", "leftist bots", "always politically left", "skews quite left", "Obviously this website is rigged for the liberal agenda", "the level of wokeness is just absurd", "leftist ideological echo chamber", "run by radical leftists, so no surprise", "You aren't allowed to go against the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party", "ideas here are ignored, down voted, flagged, shadow banned if they question the left ideology", "a very anti-libertarian echo chamber", "a heavy socialist lean, you are not allowed to have a differing perspective", "only liberals are allowed to express their political opinions on HN", "capitalism bad", "flaaaaaming, communist level liberal", "shows how much of a leftist website this is", "dang is an SJW cunt"
Links available on request. Quote quality 100% guaranteed, or your clicks back!
History has taught us, many great ideas go against the grain... and some ideas demand going against the grain before people can realize its value.
Of course there are univerally bad comments (violence and deep contemptful hatred).
If you’re curious, email hn@ and they’ll tell you what happened.
(Background: a very high ratio of comments to upvotes often means that more people want to opine than get value from the opinions. Obviously that’s not always the case, though.)
> far too many people would rather down vote than refute an argument
Another challenge is that there's not always a consensus about what downvoting is appropriate for. (Disagreement, tone, bad faith, personal attacks, poor logic, off-topic, etc.? Or just "too controversial and not likely to lead to a good discussion, even though it might well be correct"? For that matter, people can't quite agree on what is or isn't on-topic here.)
I sometimes wish HN had downvote reason metadata so that people could understand more about what was prompting other people to downvote them. You can see that people are often genuinely confused about it, but the site rules discourage people from complaining about it, and it's hard to distinguish a confused question from a complaining question when people ask why they were downvoted. But we don't really have any challenge for people to say "I was offended by your view" vs. "I think you treated someone else in the conversation disrespectfully" vs. "I don't think HN is the right place for this argument", etc.
It can be flagged without showing "[flagged]". That tag only gets shown when something is flagged to death. Your item wasn't flagged to death because it's still active.
I suspect it's mostly that a sizeable proportion of people on the site decided that it doesn't really fit with the theme and they don't want to see things like that, so they flagged it. That, associated with the large number of comments and comparatively few upvotes caused the "flame war" penalty to apply.
No conspiracies necessary, all explained by the regular dynamics.
I think this issue could use more widespread awareness!
If someone's downvoting every post you make for days or weeks, though, that seems to me to be a clearly abusive behavior. You could email the moderators. I suspect that they have the data to be able to spot that and identify the perpetrator.
People will do that. It's happened to me a couple of times. Nothing you can do about it, though, and you're not allowed to complain about it. Just take your lumps in silence.
What I've noticed in the few years I've been here is that you will be downvoted for a useless comment. Whether that comment is hurtful, comedic, arrogant... if it doesn't add to the discussion, then it's kind of a useless comment and will be downvoted.
The thing with HN though is that it is rigorously moderated by users and admins to a fairly strict set of guidelines. This means that if you're posting something that doesn't align with the goals of the community, then it probably won't be liked and feel like you were shadow-banned.
And you can always come back as bigiain2 or ratsmack2 later...
Assuming that HN/YCombinator “owes” you any points reputation is a pretty silly point of view.
I guess there probably are some cases where YC (or other) backed startups might judge people based on HN meaningless internet points, but if you care about that, perhaps your choices to argue vehemently enough against the groupthink here are nit great choices for you? You probably aren’t waging a vegan or anti surveillance capitalism war of words on your LinkedIn in that case, you might want to keep personal crusades out of your professional persona here if you are playing a profession persona here?
Or own the personal crusades, because if Facebook or Google refuse to hire me based on my privacy stance in my HN post history, or Palantir refuse to hire me based on my distrust of law enforcement? I’m totally OK with that. I will back out of arguments with Googlers or Facebookers well before things get to punitive downvoting stage though, just for my own sanity...
I see it as not so much “take your lumps”, but more like “Meh, haters gonna hate - just ignore them.” Not a perfect solution, sure, but if you wanna participate on a anonymous/pseudonymous forum, that’s kinda inevitable. What’s the alternative?
While criticisms of this place are common, and often deserved - it’s still one of the largest and most civil places where discussions that interest me take place.
Stopping public discourse from descending into shit flinging cesspits is a tough job, and overall I think what happens here is amazing.
You can say that about pretty much any speech, but in this age of unlimited information available to you, you need heuristics if you want to make the most of it. Dismissing dead comments is a good one on HN in my experience. I'm more concerned about false positives (comments I choose to read because I falsely thought they would be thought-provoking) than false negatives (the comments you mention).
It's fine not to know something, but the threshold to comment should be slightly higher than that; a quick Internet search shouldn't already answer your question / remark.
If I'm not careful I start writing an answer to these, only to realize that I've already done so for the same remark several times already. At that point I just dismiss my comment and downvote instead.
I think we're kind of missing a HN FAQ which we could assume is common knowledge. Obviously I'm talking about technical topic where there is a clear answer.
You're quite right that energetic conversations can be really good, though, which means we have to review the list of threads that have gotten penalized by the flamewar detector and turn the penalty off for the ones that don't deserve it. We do that several times a day. It's not a perfect solution though, because sometimes a thread languishes for hours before we notice that that's happened.