zlacker

I've heard opposite complaints about what that slant is (I think entirely from people making their claims in good faith). And of course, both could be correct: there could be a particular mainstream and everyone whose views are outside of it in any direction might find a somewhat chilly reception.

> 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.

>>schoen+(OP)
I generally reserve down votes for personal attacks and comments that are excessively off topic.

>>ratsma+k2
That's fine, but it's not a norm here. HN explicitly allows downvoting disagreement; a downvote is less noisy and disruptive than the "I disagree with this" comments that we'd get if you couldn't.

>>ratsma+k2
I tend to downvote lazy arguments or loaded questions which can be easily answered in 10 seconds by looking them up and have regularly appeared on HN, devoid of new content.

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.