I respectfully disagree. I don't think being small and private is necessary to prevent unpopular opinions from being shouted down. But it is a very difficult problem because there are some kinds of opinions that IMO should be shouted down (flat-eartherism, holocaust denial). The tricky part is distinguishing those from crazy-sounding ideas that potentially have merit. It's a hard problem, but I believe it has solutions that don't rely on exclusivity.

> I don't think being small and private is necessary to prevent unpopular opinions from being shouted down.

IMO when promoting your heretical idea you can safely ignore those who shout you down. You need to find the right people (at the right time, in the right way) at the beginning to grow your concept. HN as a whole may be too big for some things.

I think it's possible to simultaneously release your concept publicly and target folks who see the problem as you do, growing within groups where you find success.

Why should flat-earth or anything ridiculous be shouted down? If it's as ridiculous as you think it is, it should be trivial to win any debate. The reason people shout down heretic ideas is because they are true, so they have no choice but to shout them down, since they would lose an open debate.

> Why should flat-earth or anything ridiculous be shouted down?

Why are you still sexually molesting squirrels? Oh, you're not sexually molesting squirrels? When did you stop?

(Stop for a moment to think about that before you go on.)

I never said that "flat-earth or anything ridiculous be shouted down". In fact, I said the exact opposite.

But there is a real problem with flat-eartherism and related conspiracy theories in that they cannot be combatted by reason. If you repeat a meritless claim often enough people will come to perceive it has having merit and being worthy of serious consideration despite the fact that it has no merit. And it's particularly effective if you cloak the meritless claim in a facade of intellectual inquiry, as I did above. And it's extra effective if the meritless claim is emotionally charged. (Those poor, innocent squirrels!)

If such tactics go unchallenged it can cause real problems.

..so just challenge them when confronted. Flat earth stuff is intelectual inquiry and not a loaded question like your example about squirrels. It can be easily proved wrong, so just do it.

You've obviously never tried to confront a flat-earther or their kin. You should try it some time. It's enlightening and scary and every bit as emotionally fraught as my example. And when you get to the climate-change deniers and the holocaust deniers, it stops being funny too.

You obviously neither know what the backfire effect is nor why you should engage in open debates, anyway. I've talked to people believing in god before, so I know what it's like to talk to a wall. And I've talked to flat-earthers. They are fun and have interesting arguments that nicely intersect with the NASA conspiracy nerds. I came to the realization that I don't know enough about earth to counter the arguments of the flat earthers. Same with the holocaust deniers, really. But the debates were interesting and I gained new perspectives. Climate change stuff on the other hand I've never debated anyone about, since I already know that I know nothing about how this is supposed to work. No idea why CO2 is bad or why it's bad that it gets warmer a few degrees. I wouldn't mind it getting warmer. Maybe the South Pole would become a continent people can live, then. Not that I have noticed any climate change the past couple of decades I've been alive. Highest temperatures I remember are from over twenty years ago, which was about 44°C. Nowadays the hottest I recall are like 38°C. But then they changed the term from global warming to climate change for a reason, I guess.

> I believe it has solutions that don't rely on exclusivity.

Does that mean you have a solution in mind, or you have some particular reason to believe a solution exists? Or is it just a general expression of optimism?

The latter is fine, but if you have either a specific idea for a solution or a reason to believe one might be possible, then I'd love to hear it! Every time I think about this, I give up, concluding that the current system is more-or-less optimal. Ideas are shouted down not for being bad in any objective sense, but mostly just for being too far from what is currently believed to be true. This is a cheap filter, which kills a lot of really bad ideas at the price of making it hard and slow to move the needle when really necessary to do so. But any alternative I can come up with seems to require re-litigating the holocaust, every single day.

In between. I have some half-baked ideas but not enough time to implement them. But in a nutshell the idea is to do a pagerank-type calculation to compute people's reputations so that not all upvotes and downvotes are weighted equally. Upvotes from people who have more upvotes count more. There are additional details to prevent some of the more obvious ways to game that system.

> Upvotes from people who have more upvotes count more.

While this will avoid the problem of "junk opinion democracy" (each voice gets one vote, whatever the expertise), this still wouldn't avoid the problems attributed to the scientific establishment, where authority is roughly proportional to impact/prolificness/citations.

The difference being that in what I have in mind, anyone can publish and anyone can review, so it would be more like Arxiv and less like Nature or Science. In the scientific world there are stringent filters in place before you are allowed to play the game at all. Also, scientific communities tend to be small, and they are dependent on each other for funding. That introduces politics and perverse incentives. (I used to be a researcher. The politics and incestuousness is one of the reasons I quit.)

Are you familiar with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advogato and similar work from the early 2000s? I still think this kind of thing has potential.