Agreed. All sharing platforms, HN included, conflate agreement with importance. I can't disagree with someone without silencing them on HN and Reddit. And I can't congenially disagree on Facebook or Twitter, at least not in a way that transparently affects the various algorithms.
Up/Down [ Agreement; no real filtering mechanic ]
Tag -> Reason [ Other filtering / reactions ]
Flag -> spam filter signal
However, I think a real universal solution is unfortunately just non-obvious and likely not anything we've tried so far.
This bothers me too. I've encountered quite a few posts that were unreadable. Why? Was it because they violated some rule, or was it because they were unpopular opinion? I have no way to know. This is the largest problem with HN I can see.
You mean they were so faded that the text merged with the background? Highlighting it with the mouse usually works for me in this case.
Often it's a waste of time to highlight those posts with my mouse, because they're usually downmodded for good reasons. But I still feel compelled to look, and I doubt I'm alone in that respect.
To fix this, I'd limit the text contrast to two levels -- normal and obviously-but-not-illegibly faded. In other words, don't make it look like you're trying to hide something from me. If a post is so bad that it deserves to be rendered at near-zero contrast, then it's bad enough to delete altogether... and only blatant spam falls into that category IMO.
If I'm in a mood to be charitable and particularly open-minded, I can choose to squint closely or highlight with mouse, and read a greyed-out comment.
However, once that reading is done, the fact that it's greyed out means I don't feel the need to respond to it, correct it, etc. I know that it's being hidden, that people will give it less credence and attention. Plus, I just don't have to look at it once it's no longer highlighted.
In effect, greying out text is a gentle reminder to "don't feed the trolls"
Well, honestly, I think that effect is largely an outgrowth of how we've designed anti-spam processes to date.
Scalable agreement systems where large numbers of users agree X is good, then X is not spam.
> Maybe we just need a 'dislike' button along with the 'like' button. It'd certainly be an interesting experiment.
Reddit clearly functions in such a manner [as does HN]. Twitter / Facebook hide this but fundamentally its the same concept and it is largely ineffective for what your goal is [publicizing useful discussion, including disagreements].
We'd really need to figure out a better way of mitigating problematic content without using up/down votes before we can solve this problem unfortunately.