Hacker News Reader

Comment by Pacabel | Hacker News Reader

I think the problem extends beyond submission flagging.

There have been enough times where I've witnessed completely factual and legitimate comments here that happened to criticize or even just question Mozilla, Rust, Ruby on Rails, NoSQL, or some other "revered" organization or technology get heavily voted down without justification.

Some of this may just arise naturally. Certain submissions may draw the attention of people directly involved with the given organization or technology. They may take it personally when the discussion touches on perfectly valid, yet perhaps painful, topics. They respond by downvoting these comments that are totally valid and raise some good points. Even if these people are not intentionally acting maliciously, this misvoting can still be quite harmful.

I'm not certain that there's a good way of dealing with this, however.

View on HN

I rarely ever see wrongly gray comments, certainly not in a systematic way. I do see many rightfully gray comments, though. A comment being wrongfully downvoted is not actually quite harmful. There isn't any harm that happens. Unless somebody can't stand the notion that people disagree with their opinion -- but that's helpful because it drives them off the site. Usually, though, gray comments are not those where it's a matter of opinion.

Here's one example of systematic downvoting that I can think of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7836937

So sum it up, me and somebody named jsmthrowaway happened to point out some painful realities regarding the Rust programming language. The facts we brought up must have hurt the feelings of some within the Rust community (several prominent figures were involved with that discussion), and so numerous factual and perfectly legitimate comments of ours within that thread of discussion basically ended up censored.

Now, I personally don't care about karma, or whether people agree or disagree with opinions I express or facts that I may happen to point out. What I don't like, however, is seeing perfectly good content grayed out, regardless of who posted it. Censorship is always harmful.

These days, I find the grayed out comments more disruptive than beneficial. Many of them are perfectly valid content. Some of them often are quite insightful, in a way that some people probably find painful.

So instead of being comments that I feel comfortable ignoring, I usually find myself trying to read the grayed out ones even though they've been obscured and are harder to read. They're often the most worthwhile comments within a submission's discussion.

You don't think maybe people just responded naturally to a comment that started "The similarity to Rust should scare the hell out of Rust's creators and proponents" and went downhill from there? You instead think your slightly downvoted comment is evidence of systemic bias?

I merely pointed out one recent example that I could demonstrate quickly, because it happened to involve some of my comments and those of somebody else who happened to express similar ideas.

It isn't the only instance, of course. Mis-moderation is quite frequent here. Some of the discussion under this submission is a good example of that. I see I have once again been targeted by people who find it easier to downvote than to bother discussing the matter at hand like adults.

I wish that people here were more willing to discuss stuff that they might happen to disagree with, rather than engaging in censorship.

I think people downvoted that comment because they thought it was wrong, was based on a completely hyperbolic worldview, and had a very high excitement:substance ratio.

The disconnect here is that downvotes are considered OK when you simply disagree with something. The problem arises in that people can be made "dead" when this happens, and that individual posts become virtually unreadable because a few people disagreed with them.

Almost always the "dead" posts are worthless, and the people who replied should have been downvoted for indulging the conversation.

Your (and others') comments about Rust/Mozilla normally get detailed replies indicating how they are either wrong, or misrepresentions (I would go so far as to label them as willful mispreresentations now, given the number of times the discussions have come up).

(I don't speak for the other topics, though.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com