I think that the point of the downvote button on HN is to reduce the visibility of comments that don't contribute to the discourse, not to dismiss dissenting opinions.

This is helped by the fact that it's used sparingly and is only available to people with a certain karma threshold (an imperfect metric, but one that's worked reasonably well so far)

Agreed, the karma barrier does help a decent amount. But even on HackerNews I see the same "downvoting mob mentality" occasionally where all comments expressing certain views or disagreeing with comments of more popular users are reduced in visibility because of down voting. In a way, it gives the higher ranked users a platform to push their own posts higher/other posts lower, not unlike the way capitalism can widen economic gaps between the rich and the poor.

While it is helpful to hide comments that don't have much to do with the discussion, upvoting related comments has the same effect without the downside of making the comment invisible to people who want to see it and without impacting the user's status on HN.

We actually thought the same thing about downvotes, which is why we removed them in Imzy.

One of the things we've tried to do to decrease the groupthink/echochamber is get rid of any kind of "default" communities or a universal front page or anything like that, because we believe that does lead to a lot of low quality conversations and groupthink. Instead, you only join communities you specifically opt into, and hopefully that way each community only has people who are actually passionate about those topics and discussions become more in depth and informed.

I'm curious, because I came around to Slashdot after its peak had passed--what parts of their system did you think worked best, so I can make sure we try to do the best we can on our platform?

Not OP - I was on slashdot back in the day and I did enjoy the reason for the moderation on the post. I'm also a bit convinced that the rule you could moderate a discussion or post in it but not both made for an interesting dynamic. The moderate the moderator was nice too.

Downvotes do come in many forms, twitter didn't have downvotes until they added lists, then lists became a way to downvote.

Got it. Thank you for the response! It's always helpful to be able to learn more from all other platforms. We do require community leaders to enter a reason whenever they remove a post or comment, ban someone, etc., and the OP is always notified of the reason (and soon we'll be adding it so that it's visible if you have a link to the removed post/comment as well).

That's really interesting about the decision to be able to moderate or post but not both. One thing we're doing in order to be able to help with moderating the moderator is that soon there will be a public leader log that shows what actions leaders have taken in their community and why they did it, so that people can see how their leaders are behaving. Hopefully as we grow we'll be able to add more tools that help leaders manage their communities and help the communities manage their leaders. :)

The ability to overthrow a dictator has worked in non-computer situations.

I'm a bit curious, is there a stated definition of harassment that you've agreed to?

This is probably WAY more than you want to know, but this is a very nuanced issue that can't be addressed briefly to do it any kind of justice, as made obvious by the headline of the article we're commenting on describing us as a "warm, fuzzy, safe space." I'll copy paste this from a post we made on our site that elaborates on our community policy where a lot of this is also located, then summarize some more:

> You are welcome to express your opinions, even if they are offensive to some users. We want honest and open discussion to happen on Imzy from all sides. However, these opinions cross the line into malicious speech when they specifically incite violence or hatred, or make people fear you will act against them in a violent manner.

> Don't encourage violence or hatred on the basis of things like race, ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, or sexual orientation.

> Don’t harass others. Harassment is defined as "a course of conduct directed at a specific person that causes substantial emotional distress in such person and serves no legitimate purpose" or "words, gestures, and actions which tend to annoy, alarm and abuse (verbally) another person". Do not engage in or provide a platform for harassment of users or communities. Harassment will not be tolerated.

Paraphrasing the rest of our post so this doesn't get too long:

Things like "I think all [race/religion/gender/other demographic] are [rude opinion]" or "You’re a [rude comment here]" is okay, but "All [race/religion/gender] should [have something terrible done to them]" or "I’m going to [specific threat against an individual]" is not. And even in the "okay" examples, if you continually and repeatedly engage in these actions against an individual and follow them throughout Imzy to do so, this crosses the line into harassment.

Beyond that, there's a big gray area. We know there are things that will come up that we won't quite fit anywhere in the policies we've written, and we'll have to make some things up as we go and refine our policies and understanding as the community evolves. And yeah, we're human, and we'll probably make mistakes sometimes. But we're working hard to set a tone of transparency and fairness so that our users will always know why we're doing things and be able to give feedback on how they want Imzy to function.

Please do not call it a "safe space". I've witnessed occasions where any and all differing voiced opinion motivated people in the US to organize loud "where's my safe space" protests. I don't claim to understand how/why they feel that way, but looking from the outside, I cannot follow their reasoning. So, having that in mind, your use of "safe space" makes it sound like it'll attract many of those who don't want different opinions to be voiced.

Let's commit a small rudeness and step away from the airy theoretical.

- The US is so unsafe, you can get armed bureaucrats reaching into your ass in public and feeling your hemorrhoids. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2016/04/01/...)

- It's so unsafe, mobs of sociopathic videogamers can "SWAT" your family by calling a SWAT team to your house. (http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/12/4693710/the-end-of-kindnes...)

- It's the world's biggest jailer of its own populace; for many a police state.

So some ensure "safety" for themselves by having all the state's violence on their side of the debate. I personally get to be pretty safe. But others want a little safety too, which is a prerequisite to freely express their opinions.

To be clear: we're not talking about shutting down dissenting opinions on math. We're talking about shutting down the violence that supports one side's mediocre, backwards ideas. No wonder why some struggle to maintain that lopsided advantage.

We've actually never used the words "safe space" to describe ourselves, fwiw. It's an extremely polarizing term that has evolved to mean very different things to people, and the image it triggers in most people's minds of SJWs and crazy trigger warnings all over the place and no dissension allowed ever is not what we're trying to build. Those were the author's words.

Your list of "things like ..." misses "belief" and probably more.

Yes, agreed. It's impossible to be totally comprehensive. That was meant as an example of the types of things you should not persecute people for.

I usually just downvote comments that are factually wrong, because they sink to the bottom of the page and people are less likely to be confused by them.

I think the best thing you can do is explain why they are factually wrong in that case and try to teach them/correct them. Otherwise, they just start to dislike the community and don't gain any new knowledge.

Precisely, if I disagree but do not counter a comment, then why should I be allowed to silently hide their comment? It's fine to upvote but downvoting makes no sense, especially anything below 1 discourages contributors, seeing how they're silenced for unpopular opinions.

Agreed. I really found it annoying that Github decided to include -1 on PRs and issues because it encourages people to just pick the cheapest cost option and not express their argument against a change, which is probably one of the best possible ways to block new contributors.

What if downvotes were a limited resource (maybe time limited)? It could help if downvoters had to think twice about pushing that button, in case something else deserved their downvote more.

EDIT: or a downvote requires a comment of why the parent was downvoted and/or a selection of pre-defined reasons e.g. factually incorrect, misleading, trolling, spam, etc (similar to Dota2's report system).

My thought is downvote, but it will take away from your karma (-1 point). The only way it wouldn't or you get that point back is if you left a comment, possibly responding why you downvoted in the first place (factual, wrong, not relevant to the discussion, etc). Quid pro quo.

I think putting "real" value to karma would be a bad idea. People already karma whore even if it has no real value (although it has perceived value). I imagine it would be worse if it has some actual (limited) value.

How would you combat spamming or obvious admissions of astroturfing? Seems like it would be easy to game the system by bombarding it with "shit posts."

Hmm, how about one user downvotes, provides the appropriate reason, then others can "join or agree" with that user's downvote by upvoting his/her comment. Maybe this could somehow count as multiple downvotes with the same reason?

Also anyone who downvoted without commenting should have their hn-name displayed on the right side or below in a list of silent downvoters. It should of course adapt if you comment later or remove your comment, by removing or adding your name to the downvoters list.

Completely agree. The problem is that the downvote means too many things at the same time (Spam AND Disagree AND Not-adding-to-the-convo)

HN rules suggest that one shouldn't downvote to disagree, but it's not what's happening.

One solution is to keep the upvote button and replace the downvote one with a link, e.g. "Report" where you'd pick the reason.

I think the existence of the #nevertrump movement and the lack of downvote in presidential elections shows the need for a downvote button.

To bring it back to social media, I think Facebook conversations are especially poor in quality and a way to politely disagree would be good for the site and, as facebook grows, good for discourse generally.

As someone outside the US, I never understood the fixation on candidates, given that they can tell a lot but the ones who make policy are still the same think tanks, lobbyists and bureaucrats working in DC their whole life. Sure, Trump, may try to push through one or two bad things, but he doesn't control the direction of the ship at all. Without the crew of a sail ship on his side, as a metaphor, Trump can rant whatever he wants. It'll go down in the books just as the escapades of other POTUSes. What I'm getting at is that the important, life-changing stuff happens behind the curtains and POTUS is merely the pony to entertain the masses and sometimes represent the policy created by the large government body. There are thousands of things a POTUS was against but had to defend, because the POTUS was there to represent the whole in the form of someone approachable. To me this is all some weird psychological game used to manage the population, and I like to think humanity has enough experience/knowledge to aim for a reasonable world without stupidity and sentiment-based ruling. Every logician must be very sad at how the world is managed.

In summary, who cares of Trump is POTUS, he'll be just another show piece without real control in a much more complex game of power dynamics.

That said, if someone wants to filter trumpology, they can ignore or flag them in their personal SPAM filter and statistics will do the rest. If that doesn't work, I'm sure you can silence certain Facebook profiles for you personally, just like one doesn't attend certain social circles in the real life.

I don't know. The DREAM act, the changes to the healthcare laws, stimulus-oriented recession recovery, the sequestration, digital surveillance, and the TPP are all very important and very much results of decisions of the President.

How sure are you that these are things he personally pushed through without them being things lobbied for by others? That's what I mean. Trump can talk about a wall he wants the neighbor to pay for, but it won't happen, so who cares.

If anything I'd be more concerned about Hillary, since she is perceived as the good one, but she has ulterior motives, in part of course due to campaign money. In any case, she's not an example of a female leader who looks for peace and happiness, like some female presidents have claimed all females power figures to be in contrast to male leaders.

HN is different in that the user needs a substantial amount of karma before they can downvote (and I think theres additional levels for flagging etc). I'm not sure of the amounts and it may also take into consideration account age.