News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wron... by Banana699 on Thursday April 15, 2021 @10:19AM (#26820823)
>low-effort troll comments

This is the crux of the matter, how do you know a comment is a troll, rather than an honestly held and expressed contraversial view? parent's point is that you can't in general. So it's up to defaults: default to assuming bad faith and you will be rewarded with swift oppression of trolls but also honest mavericks whose contraversy help stir things up and invigorate discussions, default to assuming good faith and you tolerate both with mixed results. There is no easy answer.

Recommended read on this is Paul Graham's "What you can't say"[0], a timeless piece on how the bathwater of offensive and unpopular opinions always contain the baby of non-conformist truth, and you don't know in advance which is which, so you need to tolerate the first lest it is actually the second in disguise.

[0]: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

Re:The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wron... by krapp on Thursday April 15, 2021 @02:19PM (#26824254)
A troll isn't someone who simply holds controversial views, but who argues in bad faith, and there are many examples of that on Hacker News.
Re:The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wron... by dang on Friday April 16, 2021 @12:21AM (#26829413)
There are many commenters who post abusively, but in my experience it is not the case that they're posting in bad faith. I think that is actually rather rare. Users are far too quick to assume this about each other.