I read somewhere that downvotes are capped to -4 and it made me much less likely to self-censor when I felt like I had a valid point.

I know that the people who disagree with me outnumber those that agree, but the way that the upvotes bounce up and down tells me there are more people out there that agree with me than I would have assumed.

(Plus I think I've only made it down to -4 once or twice)

There have been many times when I wanted to use my upvoting ability to unhide a comment that has some merit. To that end, I wish I could see the precise score of downvoted comments. (IIRC, a net score of -1 prevents a majority of HN readers from seeing the comment.)

? -1 score greys out a comment, nothing more

Hmm, I seem to recall comments being entirely suppressed from view on reaching some threshold, thought it was -1...

Definitely not. The only comments that are hidden by default are the [dead] ones, and anyone can see them by turning 'showdead' on in their profile. Outright deletion is possible, but only for a few hours, or if the author specifically asks us to later. There have been a handful of exceptions in obscure cases over the years, mostly for legal reasons.

Btw, for anyone who has trouble reading a faded comment, you can click on its timestamp to go to its page and the text should be readable.

you see how much discussion is happening under a 0-point parent?

I've seen some. Usually when the non-positive post is something substantive as opposed to a hot take.

Unfortunately you still get the [flag] abuse. It seems that some members are able to flag posts and you can often find if you say something disagreeable in a thread that every single one of your comments will get flagged regardless of the content of the comment in question. The comments can be well-written, non-confrontational and be a genuine attempt to start a discussion, but they'll get flagged because someone doesn't like what you wrote but (presumably) can't form an argument against it (like Paul Graham said, people only really hate things that could be true).

I self censor for a different reason. What if someone decides to find that one political comment I made few years ago after I am back on my legs again to drown me?

What I have learned from struggling a lot with issues normal people don't face (at least going by majority) is that we are all toxic to each other. Some things are more visible and easily understandable for others while many aren't. It may feel pretty shitty for a disabled person inside a room of normal people complaining about very trivial things and calling for others to become disabled as a joke. Some autism jokes may actually invoke sad memories for others. But there are groups of young people who do all those and don't think it is toxic. Joking about depression is another. There are many examples where line of toxicity isn't so visible for a specific majority.

People have difficulty imagining the scale of time and when that difficulty helps them form a tribalistic decision to justify their own biases, it's much more easier to do that than fight against the urge.

The rise of short attention span only means people are much less empathetic than they seem to think they are by social media.

It's only my opinion but an empathetic person will look beyond that this person has some horrible political opinions and I want to run a witch hunt. A tweet out of 20k tweets in isolation doesn't say much about the person especially if it's old. They might be having a bad day, may want attention and said something controversial to get it. Maybe they do have medical problems (I know I do, I am on meds and my behavior changes a lot). And even if that person is officially shitty, I don't see why would you try to burn their house. It's ok to inform others but what's the point of attacking someone that they think "nobody" cares about them?

If nobody cares about improving those people, then they might as well become too extreme in their opinion. If nobody wants to hear them, they might as well be racist. We all strive for connection and the reason why we don't want discrimination to exist is we don't want to lose our ability to interact with people we care about. If all racists can get are other racist people or no one, why would they change?

Side note, most if not all outrage on social media (esp twitter and youtube) seems to be created by sufficiently motivated individuals. It's as obvious as a bright sky. So I wonder if you can live sharing your opinions while not getting bad side on one of those twitter mob groups.

This feels like an instance of negativity-bias. If you're willing to self-censor to avoid downvotes shouldn't you also be willing to shill / virtue signal for upvotes?

My problem with downvotes isn't the effect on my score. It's the fact that the font becomes paler. Dissenting opinions are singled out in a way that makes them look bad/wrong. I also don't like how the UX doesn't represent the distribution. A post with no votes will look like a post with 50 upvotes and 50 downvotes.

I am fine with downvotes, and with some UX mechanism to let people know that a post is being downvoted. But I think the current UX engenders groupthink.

What about if you have say 7 downvoted comments in a row, you might be shadowbanned [forever]?

That seems much worse. As well as not being transparent at all.

Is that true? I've gotten hella downvotes but still not shadow banned. I think it's because people read my comments in their own voice rather than in my voice and take offence to the words whereas it's just a way of communicating using signals in order to point to an underlying meaning

Do you know a time period where you got more than 2 downvoted comments in a row? I couldn’t find that from quickly going through your comment history. Sure there’s a decent amt of downvoted comments but the non downvoted ones not only are much larger in number, they will happen 5+ times in a row. I threw out a random number. But mostly was saying something like 7 or 10 downvoted greyed out comments in a row over some number of days depending on some factors could get you shadowbanned.

Yes, this is the worst aspect of HN's design in my opinion: the paler font is essentially the equivalent of silencing dissent.

What is worse, it is an entirely silent way of silencing dissent. I would love to experiment with the other end of the spectrum: not only should the number of downvotes be visible, downvoting someone should also require a reason to be given, in the form of a post. And it should be possible to downvote those reasons too, with the algorithm adjusting the original downvote's weight based on the score of the downvote reason.

I've been saying that too, 'reason for downvote' or 'link to profile page'

What if I told you that you can just click on the comment permlink, and that gets rid of the graying. Nobody's being "silenced" here; it's just a way to quickly assess the level of confidence in a HN comment.

Is it even a good measure though? Is the community more "confident" in a post that has 1 downvote than a post that has 50 upvotes and 52 downvotes?

HN (and many, MANY other sites, including forums, product reviews, search engines) confuses "popularity" with "quality". If there was one thing on the Internet I could fix by waving a magic wand, it would be this idea that more people [liking|linking|upvoting] something means it is better. Crowdsourced curation doesn't work.

Why are you afraid of downvotes? There's little reason to self-censor due to an internet currency.

And I wouldn't say the forum is "exactly this" unless you're saying that downvotes are on par with getting "fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or killed."

If you get downvoted, you will be rate limited. So your ability to participate in the discussion will be limited.

This is a really interesting question. I know I - and most of us - seem to have a sensitivity to negative social responses, that it's own freestanding emotional response, it's not linked directly to any pragmatic connection to the consequences of that response. Which is why in a mass society, where that avoidance response is not well matched to consequences that sociopathy becomes a superpower.

I often find myself thinking that we either need to create a healthier mechanism for finer grained social consequences at a mass scale, or accept that the future belongs to sociopaths and cancel culture.

There's a bit of a difference between "not saying things because you may lose a dozen of meaningless internet points" and "not saying things because you can have a mob of haters try to get you and you family fired, you life ruined and maybe send men with guns drawn to your home to get you murdered if they're lucky".

I don’t self-censor. I don’t really pay attention to votes except as a barometer for how HN interpreted the topic or content of my post or comment. I try to post within the guidelines and rules and generally not be divisive. And yet I often get a warning that I’m posting too fast. Seems like a form of HN’s invisible soft mod power that suppresses legitimate comments and posts. I know this because I tried to post something yesterday afternoon, got the posting too fast error, and now the post is made by someone else 12 hours ago or so. How can these kinds of casual censorship be quantified across HN? It’s hard to talk about that which you can’t say.

Why do you care about invisible internet points? Create an alt-account and use it in good faith.

There is a chilling effect happening, and people need to be able to make unpopular arguments -- again, in good faith.

I don't care about invisible internet points, but people do get banned from here if they rock the boat too much.

Exactly, downvotes hurt so much!

Honestly, I once got a gentle slap from dang, and it made me reevaluate my comment. Downvoting is easily ignored.

I find down votes are usually the posts I'm most proud of. Nothing crazy, just means I dared to have an opinion.

Also quite amusing what someone will take time out of their day to down vote sometimes.

I had something similar. My comment actually had a lot of upvotes, but dang rebuked me for being inflammatory. Really made me rethink whether I am writing something to share knowledge or just to anger someone.

do you think dang himself is without bias?

No. But I trust that dang will roll out self references to his old comments circling in an infinite recursion to explain what he means when he is scolding. Most mods online don't even do that. He might be wrong sometimes as all humans will be but you can ask him to clarify.

He has to regularly see multiple sides of the site. HN is pretty diverse depending on what you click and as such, I do think he is less biased in some ways we are and more biased in others as he work as a mod for hn.

Oh cm'on people are way too sensitive

Downvotes don't hurt, but I wonder how many people here would stick around if HN forced all users to use their real names. How many people would instantly self-censored or completely change the way they share opinion and respond.

A lot of us would. I figure that in 10 years clever AI systems will be pretty good at attaching pseudonymous accounts with lots of posts to real people. That's why I put my Github with my real name in my profile, to remind myself.

I use my real name and censor myself heavily. Pseudonymous speech is much more honest, but I'm not prepared to quietly defy a court order to protect a pseudonym from legal discovery if an employer gets sued. And now apparently journalists might attack your opsec…

What's your point? 'Think before you speak' and 'speech has consequences' isn't exactly a new notion. Under a throwaway account on here I just write whatever pops up in my mind, when I co-author a paper under my and my colleague's real life names that's going to be read and cited, everyone triple checks everything so that as few innacurate or dumb things get published. How is this new or shocking in any way?

The thread of comments started with the mention of 2 papers discussing how people are reluctant to sharing their opinion because the "social cost" may be too high.

A reply comments on how HN is somewhat similar. People censoring themselves due to fear of being downvoted. I pointed out that IMO downvotes are a very mild sanction and truly, people don't need to censor themselves on HN, but the true cost would come if everyone had to comment with their real names.

Sorry it wasn't groundbreaking enough for you.

Naw dude your point is not lost -- and all this discussion is happening on a zero-point comment mind you

I'd probably still be around!

The way free speech in my country is being limited currently, I would not post anymore.

Maybe now it's still okay, but in ten years, who knows, I may be "cancelled".

Not that it hasn't already happened to others.

Dudes, this comment has gone from 0 to 5 votes, I don't even know what to make of it any more.

I do this, but generally the comment wouldn’t have added much to the discussion in that case anyway.

Who actually knows? The whole reason we exist is to say or do that thing that would not be said or done if we hadn't been there to say or do it..

Why do you care about fake internet points?