I am sure there are many different groups here! But yah, there are definitely folks that will be happy. I was just trying to say that, beyond Twitch being within its rights, people can still yell at them and say they shouldn't (or should) do it. No need to leave it at "this is legal and in line with previous behavior."

Sure. I find it extremely tiring to read about how this is a slippery slope, and how this is somehow oppressive or unusual for American media.

I don't mind folks coming in and saying, "Hey, this is a change that I dislike." But a lot of the discourse here today is just outrage and finger pointing and yelling about free speech absolutism.

I think that HN's downvoting system actually makes it harder to have a reasoned discourse about topics like this, because if I disagree with the prevailing opinion in this community that Twitch is doing a bad thing, it's likely my comment gets strongly downvoted, rather than opening a line of discussion.

I don't know how to solve this. Maybe separate "I disagree" vs "Off-topic/poor quality comment" downvotes?

There's a reasonable discussion to be had about the decision Twitch made. I happen to think it's a good decision, and I'd love to be able to have that discourse in a calm way, but I don't know how to have it in something like HN where comments get swept up in voting and yelling and hostile replies.

I very much agree that unmarked voting systems like HN's do a really poor job of keeping comments "high quality." Everyone has a different definition of quality.

I understand that there are UX challenges to adding different kinds of votes, but I totally agree that the UI affordances we have right now make conversation harder instead of easier.

I wonder if separating "quality" (vote + or -) from "reports" ("excessively rude", "inappropriate", "off-topic") would be useful. I do think that people can be excessively rude and useful at the same time. Edit: So, this would change from "-3 points" -> "-3 points [rude: 3, off-topic: 5]".