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Comment by kungito | Hacker News Reader

HN uses voting to legitimize content of higher quality and tries to avoid political discussion. What you are doing is generalizing the non-issue of most platforms allowing the silent majority to express their opinion about other people's opinions. The funnies part about people complaining about getting downvoted is that no one is even removing or preventing you from speaking their mind even if they fucking hate the opinion. On reddit some extremist groups exist for quite a long time before they get banned. Firs they want a platform, ok, then they want to silence all opposing opinions within their small garden, and then they start going to other communities to harass and impose their content which doesn't belong there after which they get banned and restart the cycle.

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>HN uses voting to legitimize content of higher quality

The majority of the down votes I have seen are for disagreement, and not for the quality of the post. I have seen many comments down voted and flagged dead that were eloquently stated and/or just an opinion.

True. The reason is that voting and downvoting semantic is perceived differently, and people’s ego. The easiest, although imperfect, solution I think would be that downvoting costs you some karma (both the downvotee and the downvoter).

> downvoting costs you some karma

Gab had implemented that early on, but currently I believe they eliminated down voting altogether.

> The majority of the down votes I have seen are for disagreement, and not for the quality of the post.

It often looks like there is no other explanation than mere dislike or disagreement, which is unfair and calls for improvement. My policy: never downvote any post, and on the contrary, upvote posts that are contrary to my views but have merit and thus are worthy of consideration.

I wish there were better ways to highlight thought-provoking posts, yet moderation is essential. A popular voting system is better than nothing.

Let's compare this with the ability to block people on Twitter just because they disagree with you. That's stupid and not conducive to having a discussion—but then again, this wasn't the point of Twitter in the first place. At the same time, this is also a blessing for people who want to avoid negativity.

In the long run, ignoring problems doesn't make them disappear. Suppressing exposure to bad ideas also comes at the cost of blocking the unpopular good ones.

Blocking on Twitter is a necessary minimum to avoid the abuse and death threats. You can't have a discussion there because (unlike HN) there's no strong pressure to basic civility.

Mere opinion is not very valuable. If you want to post something that goes against the grain and actually convince people, you have to tailor it to the audience.

But then it's not your opinion, but just a statement to appease the audience.

The silent majority is pretty fucking stupid as a whole. It’s hard to have an informed populous when they are allowed to censor the stories that make their emotions feel bad. It’s like allowing grade schoolers to vote on what they eat for lunch every day.

As a reddit user, this is what you’re dealing with. The non-college educated majority has control over the following things:

- what politics you see - what comments you see - what science you see - what news you see

It’s going to take a while, but one of the emerging lessons of this era is that democracy for information spreading is a pretty terrible idea. Ted the conspiracy enthusiast/barista maybe shouldn’t have the same voting power on a comment thread about orbital dynamics as an astrophysicist.

> The non-college educated majority...

Ironicaly the college educated way overrate themself on how objectively they see the world and think they know better than the rest, but they fail to see the forest for the tree just as often as non-college educated.

College does not give you the ability to see objectivity, it just increases knowledge across a specific field.

See: reproductability crisis.

College is the only level of education where they even attempt to teach critical thinking skills. It’s definitely not a high success rate, but it’s better than the rote memorization that comes from high school level.

What’s left is self taught which is a tiny slice of both populations.

> See: reproductability crisis.

That has no relationship to college education. The reproducibility crisis impacts the quality of research for PhD programs. It has nothing to do with spending time learning logic and philosophy that hasn’t changed for hundreds to thousands of years. The fact that you think the reproducibility crisis has anything to do with a college education sort of proves the point...

Yes, the system doesn't work. When Usenet died it got replaced by forums and the old trolls got granted admin rights. The non-sane people that have a lot of time to post all day end up with the highest reputation and privileges.

On the other hand closed groups of experts also don't work. I once knew some really extreme religious guys - pretty much flat-earthers. They were all heading for bioscience and networked like crazy - they got jobs in academia. Lonely brilliant scientists didn't.

Most likely a lot of science-communities have already been overrun by "networks".. Maybe the era of rational thinking is coming to an end.

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