What's crazy is that for most of HN's history ending about 3-4 years ago, both of our comments would have been met with upvotes. I wish I had access to the information dang does to see the average age of accounts downvoting comments such as ours.

The last few years definitely have had a feeling of eternal september and of all the eternal septembers I've experienced in my 26 years on the Internet, this is by far the worst and most toxic to open, thoughtful and nuanced discussion.

My general observation is that those that best recognize the importance of such liberties also possess the greatest faculties in abstraction (a fundamental skill for success in engineering, especially software engineering). For it is only through abstraction that someone is able to back out from the concrete issue at hand and see generalizable principles and how they might apply to other issues under other circumstances.

My suspicion is that as HN and tech in general has caught the attention of a broader audience, that the median capacity to abstract has dropped and a plurality lacks the comparable capacity to reason abstractly as once existed on HN.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/S/September-that-never-...

There’s a solution: k-means clustering.

This would aggregate people for whom downvote means “I don’t agree”, and separately those whose downvote means “that’s an inflammatory/ unsupported/ insane position”.

Soon, those open to reasoned debate would see comments by others known for reasoned debate — regardless of their political/ideological stripe.

The trolls would be relegated each to their own echo-chamber.

Everybody wins!

You should share this with dang as an optional feature that can be enabled like "showdead"