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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Obviously some HN users have defending Apple while others have been denouncing Apple. So much so that I've had to pin moderation comments to the top asking for better discussion than Glory-to-$BigCo vs. Death-to-$BigCo flamewars [1].

But everyone notices and remembers the comments they dislike the most [2], so each side thinks that "HN" is slavishly and perversely on the other side [3]. It would be good to get a little more awareness into this process.

[1] Like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24310804 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24249613.

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

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It's really a universal human flaw: to perceive a huge group of people as an entity that can be dealt with as if it were an individual.

Would be cool to see a UI that added friction to that.

> It would be good to get a little more awareness into this process.

Make upvotes and downvotes public, and do something to reduce the constant flood of throwaway accounts who do nothing more than constant trolling on contentious topics.

Downvotes and upvotes being hidden is the only thing keeping HN from devolving into reddit. Otherwise, people would just agree with whatever had the biggest number instead of (hopefully) applying some critical thinking.

I'm not talking about the quantity, I'm talking about a list of who upvoted and downvoted a specific comment/post.

Also what you've described happens anyway. The fact that a number isn't displayed doesn't really matter when comments are ultimately ordered by score. When someone writes a comment that doesn't adhere to the current groupthink, they get downvoted. When people are downvoted too much they delete their comments, stop commenting, or through pavlovian reinforcement change their opinions until they get positive points.

Wouldn’t knowing who upvoted and downvoted be even worse as retaliation would become a thing?

Those things wouldn't increase the kind of awareness I'm talking about.

We're not going to disclose how users vote. That's some of the most private data HN has.

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