Re:I'm not a Woman in Tech
by FeepingCreature on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @02:05PM
(#14704778)
To my knowledge, you can't downvote unless you have a certain amount of karma.
> It seems to be free to downvote or upvote, so economically it would make sense that there are no repercussions.
Since there is no cost to downvoting, it is cheaper in terms of time and effort to--anonymously!--censor opinions than to express them. It's doubly bad because, in order to acquire downvoting privileges, you must first express enough "correct" opinions, which makes the system self-selecting for certain views. It's a fundamentally broken system, because it incentivizes the wrong things, and it's why I stopped commenting here....oops.
Re:I'm not a Woman in Tech
by zimpenfish on Thursday July 06, 2017 @12:08PM
(#14711403)
> Since there is no cost to downvoting, it is cheaper in terms of time and effort to--anonymously!--censor opinions than to express them.
Sometimes it's cheaper in terms of time and effort to downvote rather than engage because the comment or commentator displays obvious* signs that a discussion will be fruitless.
* To me, of course; I only represent myself and my opinions.
When I posted this, the upvotes went up to +3 points, and then steadily have been declining to -2 points.
No one has commented as to why they are downvoting or whatever. Fine. But I have noticed this on many of my other posts. And I wonder sometimes whether people actually have downvoting rings / clones on HN for topics/people/opinions! It seems to be free to downvote or upvote, so economically it would make sense that there are no repercussions.