Hacker News Reader

Comment by moralsupply | Hacker News Reader

To get negative votes in Hacker News:

* Post something that is factual, but the crowd doesn't like

* Post something that is logical, but the crowd doesn't like

* Post a link to something reasonable, but that the crowd doesn't like

Just to say that Hacker News is a highly biased community. There's very little space here to discuss anything that is not "conventional" beyond some bits of technology.

When a topic touches life in general it becomes a place for political narratives associated with the establishment (meaning: left leaning), which is probably explainable due to the fact most people here work in big tech companies that have strong government ties.

View on HN

I think it's still possible to go against conventional narrative on HN and get upvoted, but one needs to word one's comments with an extraordinary amount of extra care, completely stripped of sarcasm or confrontational tone, remaining objective even when under personal attack - in short, one is held to a much higher standard (in terms of quality and substance of comments) than those posting conventional opinion.

I agree with that. It generally applies to most online forums as well.

We don't tend to have a "thick skin" for ideas that make us uncomfortable.

Surely negative votes if the crowd doesn't like will pretty much happen by definition any place people can down vote?

HN is worse than other sites because if a comment is downvoted early on by a handful of users, the upvote button disappears and it can’t be upvoted later by others who agree with it. So there is no way of knowing the true score of a comment if the people who dislike it found it first.

HN also literally disappears downvoted comments by making them unreadably light colored and eventually hiding them to all users who haven’t enabled the “Show Dead” setting.

Not only negative votes, but flagging as well. The flagging mechanism is commonly used on HN to completely disappear dissenting opinions.

No, the flagging works well for unsupported opinions (usually with quite bad discourse included) being pushed, if you feel you were flagged wrongly you can always go check with the mod team and explain why you believe your behaviour shouldn't have been flagged.

I believe that HN is one of the most open forums for dissenting opinions when those opinions are well-presented and substantiated.

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