Ask HN: The most disliked HN posts/comments | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: The most disliked HN posts/comments

12 pointssoheil16 comments

Youtube released 2018 Rewind and it ended up being the most disliked video in Youtube's history. I often think it's a shame there is no most downvoted section like there are various top lists, best of, etc. on HN. Part of it may be that the most downvoted comment/post eventually gets flagged and dropped, but still seems like it's viable that there should be posts that got so many downvotes before they were taken down thus outranking the rest in number of downvotes. The benefit of such list is to realize what HN community is most against and what topics cannot be discussed. Should there be such a list?

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In thinking about an answer, you made me realize one of the things I love about HN: trolling or negativity for the sake of being negative isn't allowed to accumulate attention (in general). It is dealt with swiftly and the discussion moves on.

Sure, there is negativity in the form of criticism, but that's part of a healthy discussion, IMHO.

It's not perfect, but does it a lot better than other discussion forums where people discover that negativity can give them a higher profile.

I got minus 50 points for suggesting that not all violent homeless people are mentally ill, and that mental illness is a poor predictor of violent behaviour, and that you shouldn't assume a violent homeless person is mentally ill.

I thought they limited the downvote karma to -4?

They have now.

That’s what I thought. I had this brutal exchange where I was willing to burn some karma to make a point:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9904732

I see you in there DanBC. :-)

You actually saved me from a severe beating.

Didn't know that. What happens after -4?

Seriously?!

I said it quite grumpily.

There was some weirdness with the edit window time meaning I could no longer edit to remove the grumpiness, nor delete the post, but could still get downvotes.

That does not seem to be an unreasonable opinion. Sure, it could be wrong (seems like data would have the answer one way or another) but either way in itself not offensive or really deserving of a downvote. strange. did anyone comment with an opposing view?

People seem to lose track of all nuance when it comes to 'social harmony with Western characteristics'.

I said many years ago that it would be interesting to rate posts not in some pseudo-objective good-bad way but in terms of agreement or not, and that you could then modulate the ordering of posts on a per-user basis by proximity to the preferences of people you had expressed preferences about.

This was dismissed as overly complex for arc, but I really would like to see the unfiltered graph of HN's social network to study the various voting rings and social subgroups.

My most downvoted comments basically say:

- Copyleft is cancer

- Privacy is overrated

I think there is an interesting discussion to be had about privacy vs security. When it comes to computers, there is no such thing as privacy if there is not security. So all things being equal, it’s partially acceptable that Google has great security but not great privacy (currently). If they didn’t have security, then Google + anyone who wanted to hack them would have your data.

The topic is so much more nuanced than this but food for thought.

Both are true until they are very, very not.

I can understand and agree with he downvotes if that was the bulk your stance. Although a more nuanced opinion would be great. Its good to understand why people feel this way.

There should no downvotes section, censoring terrible comments helps the rest of us to stay safe.

Safe from what exactly?

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