Well since we are actually talking about the comment section of slashdot that's quite ironic... I don't know how old you are but Slashdot was somewhat the HN of the late 90's and 00's. Take a look at how the comment section looked in those days: https://web.archive.org/web/19990508185444/http://slashdot.o... .

"So Buddha walks into a pizza parlor and says: "Hey, make me one with everything."

I don't know what/when this happened to Slashdot, I remember that most of my life I have been avoiding the comments sections of almost every website, and then I met HN :) and life changed. This is perhaps the best self-curated forum and I believe that the main reason is that we all "got better things to do with our time", and we are coming here to exchange opinions and views with similarly productive people. Maybe this is it, most of us are productive and respectful of our AND other people's time and attention.

Part of it is also that HN is a bit of an echo chamber and unpopular opinions get cast aside very consistently

That does happen, but less often than you're claiming here. Most of the time, it's easy to see how a comment violated the site guidelines or otherwise attracted downvotes. But it is less obvious to readers who agree with the comment, leading to the sensation that their views get unfairly downvoted.

There's still an interesting connection to unpopular opinions though: it's harder to express a contrarian view neutrally. Probably much harder actually.

I rather often see comments, which are well reasoned and argued downvoted for (quite obviously) no good reasons at all, except for communicating an opinion, which seems unpopular to the downvoters.

You most often see that on anything Tesla, Google, or Apple or for opinions going against the libertarian grain (granted, you sometimes see the opposite happening too on political and economic issues)

That said, I will steadfastly refuse to further comment on such downvotes since it's not only counterproductive (and against the guidelines), but that I feel the downvoter is actually debases his, or herself.

In the end it's anyway auto-correcting. I upvote comments, which I don't think deserve an upvote by itself, but that I feel are unfairly downvoted.

Thanks to the moderators, btw, who overall do I fine job of keeping the discussions lively and relevant.

HN's commenting system is fundamentally broken. there is almost zero correlation between net upvotes and insight

As anecdotal proof, I recently got upvoted 13 points for saying "I thought some of his suggestions were pretty decent. But then he just threw everything away by mucking around in the Code, I mean Overview tab. His last design, without the guiding lines, make it look like jumbled shit pie."

Not only had this same thing been said multiple times already, but I said it less well and was vulgar. I wouldn't have upvoted me Its not that I disagree with what I said, but I could have made more thoughtful. I could have done a point by point critique, showing what I thought he did right and why, and what he did wrong and why. But I didn't. I was lazy, and I said it in a way that got upvotes.

On the other hand I've spent time, up to an hour, writing careful precise comments and gotten not a single upvote, maybe some downvotes.

So, in my view, HN has a feedback mechanism that rewards trite, thoughtless, vulgar commentary. And as folks here ought to know, if you want to increase the frequency of a behavior, you reward it, and if you want to decrease the frequency of a behavior you fail to reward it.

To close, I will say one thing that HN has in its favor: trolls, goons, and jerks tend to get shut down quickly, and that's great.

Yes, indignation and snark get upvoted. That's a flaw of the voting system, so we can't live by upvotes alone. I doubt that it's specific to HN. To me it seems like humans in general.

Yep. You say something that is not in the mainstream, and your comment gets flagged, and your account gets banned for being "incendiary".

I disagree with that, I have had expressed 'extreme' opinions in this forum but I kept it civil, positive, and all I got hit with was to lose some 'karma points', and even the comments 'slapping me' were positive and I learned from the dialogue.

I am not perfect, but who is?

I believe in this forum we value open mindness and a fair dialogue. I don't like agreeing with everyone on everything, that would make a very boring and unproductive forum.

Define "extreme". Try expressing ideas that are anti-egalitarian or anti-democratic and see how far you can go.

Lots of people are anti democratic. Democracy is pretty bad. Look at the state of the world. But there’s a difference between being anti-democratic and pushing a clearly even worse government design as if it has observably more merit.

For those you might need to define and defend your stance a bit more carefully. but is that really unfair?

No. I've never been banned for being incendiary and I use the comment section almost exclusively to criticize things, including this comment which I now feel compelled to disagree with given that my experience contradicts it.

Slashdot was more like a cross between something like lobste.rs (in its focus on 'nerds') and reddit (in its wide range of discussion subjects) than it resembled HN. It was a far more easygoing and 'fun' place in what was in many ways a more 'fun' time compared to the often overdone seriousness of this place and time. It was at /. that many of the vices and virtues of the tech-related internet forum world came into being, from the shit-posting natalie-portman-with-hot-grits-down-wherever-they-went trolls to sometimes surprisingly insightful comments on current issues. There were no self-important VC-chasing startup tycoons, at least not in the earlier years. While there was quite a bit of group-think - e.g. the well-known operating system from Redmond, WA was not popular and anything related to it or the company behind it was generally ridiculed - those who spoke outside of the group were not shunned as they are here and now, just teased and made fun of.

/. comment system is the best. before you dismiss that, just think for a while how well HN would fare against the same user base.

you have meta moderation divided among a vast population of users, who have to give up commenting rights for the article. you can filter for a variety of personal tastes (funny, insightful... even troll), a friend/foe modifier and so much more.

but yeah, the sanitized community and centralized moderation on HN or reddit makes for an /infinitely/ superior first visit experience, but after you log in and learn the minimum of the system (which fits nicely with the /. proposal anyway) it is in a completely different class.

on /. i actually learn some deep arcane stuff about a topic (and have a few laughs) as opposed to the serious HN hive mind, which i personally use in lieu of the (missing) article summary.

Slashdot was fun and I too learned some amazingly arcane stuff on certain topics. HN does have humor sometimes, one of my favorite threads is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12781157 looks towards the bottom. I guess we all need to be serious these days lest someone doesn't see the funny. Slashdot was pretty amazing for a community policing itself as opposed to making moderators do a lot of the heavy hauling, but you really need people to stick around and do the work.

Homogeneity is comfortable huh? Sounds like Silicon Valley thinking these days.

Yeah that ascii art with three swastikas really added to the discourse. That and the second comment “your mom is Facebook” made me think the Algonquin round table had come back to life.

You have to browse with Score -1 visible to see things like those.

As I understand it, HN (by default) also hides comments that have been moderated away.

FWIW, showdead on HN does not surface a whole lot other than SPAM. Most of the difference here appears to be a defacto level of professionalism, which seems to be mostly enforced by politely telling people to not do silly things. For all the criticisms you could have about Hacker News and SV culture in general, I will give it one thing: It is definitely one of the most civil and best moderated communities on the internet that I'm aware of right now. That's actually more sad than anything, but it is what it is.

Moderation asymmetries also leads to a chilling effect for controversial/challenging viewpoints.

That swastika person has been pulling that crap for a while: https://m.slashdot.org/profile/5542728/achievements

A community that doesn’t quickly ban such awful minority opinions will end up scaring the majority away.

Seems to be deleted now.

Person’s profile still there.