I disagree, it works mostly okay on HN except for the most polarizing subjects where it seems many people lose their cold blood and start down-voting en masse.

Your average discussion here actually seems capable of exposing multiple points of views without having to dig through the heavily down-voted comment. Similarly most people here don't seem to fall into the trap of up-voting one-liner comments that add nothing to the discussion merely because they agree with them.

There's always a blurry line between what contributes to the discussion and what does not but as far as I'm concerned it's relatively clear cut for most comments. If somebody is civil, gives arguments (or even better, sources) and doesn't appear to attempt to derail the discussion then I think it doesn't warrant being downvoted.

Actually, your comment is one that would fall on the line for me: it's negative, the "yeah, but no" structure feels a bit condescending to me and you don't actually argument your point, you're just expressing your opinion.

Yet, I don't think it warrants being down-voted, instead I up-voted other sibling comments that I deemed more interesting and wrote this reply that I hope is constructive.

I think an other thing going for HN is that there are clear posting guidelines, we're here about technology and basically "intellectual gratifying" stuff. Reddit and Twitter are social network first, news aggregator second, so people use it to like/up-vote pictures of dogs, jokes, memes etc... It's not like you're going to have a profound reply on a thread about "look, here's my Halloween costume!"

But then when you're used to reward jokes (or be rewarded for writing them) and other low-effort content it tends to contaminate the rest of the website because there's no clear limit between the "serious discussion stuff" and the "basically Facebook" stuff.

Is it really ALL subjective? Can't SOME of these things be quantified by some objective measure as determined by science?

Why are things like (e.g.) gravity and (also e.g.) psychological disorders allowed to be quantified, whilst sociological concepts are simply "all subjective" and (presumably) not the stuff of science?

In actuality, we as a species are quite capable of creating theories for anything using science, and OP's categorical suggestions are not exempt merely because they deal with morality.

Perhaps if we did converge on a widely approved standard for some of these morally-interesting questions about censorship and moderation, the overall productivity and quality of our discourse on forums like Reddit and Twitter might improve.

The temptation to use it to punish for opinions we don't like is just too strong. And as soon as somebody start using it that way, everybody else follows.

I like how person mentioning a practice of downvoting for unpopular opinions got downvoted for unpopular opinion