> Generational division is also nothing new.

This is a person of generation X talking about a problem of the same generation (i.e. X).

> Please don't respond to this if you disagree, just give it a down vote so the discussion stays on topic.

Down vote trolls, not people you disagree with. Down voting for disagreeing leads to negative experience with the whole discussion platform.

>Down vote trolls, not people you disagree with. Down voting for disagreeing leads to negative experience with the whole discussion platform.

Using downvotes to disagree has always been ok (and encouraged) on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

That's a thread from 12 years ago. HN is obviously a different community now than it was then. One problem on HN is how quickly a discussion item will fade or disappear due to excessive downvotes.

And for example, unlike Reddit, you can't downvote items on the main page, just comments.

I'd be curious to hear an updated discussion on this, but I've seen salient points being downvoted into obscurity simply because it accrued a lot of downvotes, and I'll find myself upvoting posts I disagree with just to keep the post alive.

>That's a thread from 12 years ago. HN is obviously a different community now than it was then.

Yes, pg doesn't make a point of reiterating it every year. Is the community really different? I've been around for some time and I haven't noticed. dang is a mod/admin. Here he is repeating it again a year and a half ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17996858

So we have a community manager repeatedly saying "yes, this is intended", and a random user saying it's not. The downvote button on articles is a completely separate issue.

Those are interesting points, but I think despite the official position by dang and pg, most HN users don't downvote points they disagree with as a convention. I think this is due to the fact that a comment's karma score is not shown, which is another thing that differs from Reddit. There's no real reward or feedback for downvoting a post, and you can't know for sure if that post has -2 karma or +27 karma, so you don't really know what difference it makes. I think that's a good feature of HN, by the way.

I do think HN is much bigger now. There's less discussion on philosophy of startups in general. PG himself rarely blogs about it any more. It also seems like political topics get more frequently introduced on the front page. Also there's frequent toxicity and negativity about certain technologies which do warrant intellectual discussion, but get dog piled by naysayers. Maybe that's always been there and it's my imagination but it does seem like some of the "hacker ethos" has faded.

I fully agree with you here, and think pg is utterly wrong in this regard. In the long term, it hurts everyone involved. With enough people downvoting to disagree and upvoting to agree, the community devolves to tribalism and echo chambers, and scarily shifts towards Youtube comment level of discourse.

Upvote or downvote comments, not people.

Upvote comments not because you agree with them, but because you feel they contribute to the topic at hand, for those who read the thread after you did. Especially if they make you stop even just for a few seconds and consider a new point of view, even if you end up discarding that point of view.

Downvote comments not because you disagree, but because they are of low quality (for various reasons) and a waste of time to read, given the topic at hand. Comments you disagree with can often seem that way, and it takes self-control and, shall I say, maturity, to see which is it.

Oh yes, and feel free to downvote this comment if you must, I did hijack the topic somewhat rudely here. :)

Personally, I view the vote controls as a three-way toggle. Low-quality comments get down-voted, unless they're already greyed-out (no point in piling on, unless it's truly toxic). Comments that I disagree with but are otherwise well-written and contribute to the discussion I leave alone. And comments that I agree with and that are well-written I up-vote.

But sometimes I up-vote comments that I mostly disagree with, but that I think make such an excellent point that others still might find them interesting. Or if a comment is greyed-out but I think it still contributes, I'll upvote it to counteract someone else's downvote, even if I don't necessarily agree with the comment.

Ultimately, users can do whatever they want with the up and down arrows.

> Please don't respond to this if you disagree, just give it a down vote so the discussion stays on topic.

So that the forum stays an echo-chamber? That's not why I come to hackernews. On HN (and sometimes, but less on Reddit) I can be sure there will be a respectful conversation of the all the viewpoints. That doesn't take away from the discussion, it adds to it.

I admit I might have generalized a bit, but I was far from trying to bait trolls.

I am a millennial myself (I do not know if the author is, and I do not think it is relevant) and I truly think this kind of attitude is damaging us. It sure has damaged me and and a big portion of people I know.

Besides... I did, as you say, try to respond to the bad advice. "We should focus on how to motivate ourselves to do things that we do not love, but that are necessary".

I am well aware that I might be wrong, and I think HN is a good place to debate different, and interesting, ideas. I also prefer to argument my disagreement in words rather than downvotes, because there is no discussion, otherwise :)