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Comment by znowi | Hacker News Reader

> I try to save my comments for when it's something really important.

Your approach is sound and honorable, but please do not silence yourself out of fear. By doing so you encourage a groupthink behavior on this forum.

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The entire structure of this forum encourages groupthink. Look at shadow bans, their entire purpose is to permanently silence someone that speaks against the crowd without even letting him/her know and without providing any means of appeal.

Even though the content of the submissions of this site brings me back day after day, to pretend the comment section provides any reasonable environment for meaningful discourse is laughable. Why the suppression of certain view points and people via shadow bans is acceptable to most people is something I've never quite grasped.

hueving, it's true that there is an arguable attitude in the forum, but even under this assumption, to say that the comments section [...] is laughable is unfair.

It's certainly true that has downsides, but everything has.

It has at least one interesing upside though: one can learn to formulate opinions in a thoughtful, informed, and overall solid way. This is extremely valuable, and very importantly, it's entirely up to the user.

Groupthink is omnipresent; you just can't avoid it. But I've personally noticed one thing; most of the times, opinions which are against the establishment are respected and in best case admired, if they are solid and carry interesting/unexpected/creative information. I'm not talking about HN here.

So one can perfectly thrive here (and don't get me wrong, I don't endorse craving for upvotes) while still being non-conformant to the groupthink, everywhere. I'm pretty much "anti-technology" in some perspectives, but my account still survives pretty well, and so can yours.

Shadowbans/hellbans are meant to silence trolls, not unpopular views. They sometimes hit people with unpopular views, which is a problem that needs to be sorted out, but their purpose is not to enforce groupthink, merely civility.

I think what he's saying, though, is that to many people here the expression of "unpopular views" or any sort of criticism is always and directly synonymous with "trolling". This holds true for them even when what's said is completely valid, completely with merit, and expressed in a perfectly reasonable manner.

Just try saying "my favorite language is _" and you'll see what he's saying. I tried that once, on a thread about favorite languages I added a comment saying, I use these languages for these things, thinking I might get some good advice and I got downvoted. I was respectful about how I phrased it but I still got people ticked at me.

that's precisely how I feel about HN. Many times I wanted to express controversial opinions in a respectful way, but I am too scared to get downvoted. I ended up being just a reader and spending less and less time on HN. Too bad for a site supposedly for hackers (the real meaning of the term).

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