I don't see that this follows. Limiting participation is not just compatible with democratic systems, it's crucial. Democracy-the-system (the thing being "saved") has long built in safeguards against untempered application of democracy-the-concept. Constitutions, "upper houses", multi-branch government, representative democracy itself: the idea that the untempered whims of the masses are not a stable basis for govt is practically foundational to democratic systems.
Downvotes are even more egalitarian than the proxies that eg govt uses to temper pure democracy. This can make them a double-edged sword: they deter bad actors from causing disproportionate damage to a community (eg a troll starting a flamewar has a sizable blast radius), but they do so by the standards of the community. If the community's norms are "bad" by your definition, then deterring deviation from them is a bad thing. But there's no axiomatic basis for defining what "good" norms are, and the community's views (via downvotes) is a principled mechanism (again, the principle behind democracy).
IMO, the lack of any accountability feedback loop in downvotes alone means that it's a tough sole basis for a healthy community. The best fora I've been on have been on Reddit[1], combining the presence of downvotes with the "constitutional" approach of clearly-defined conversational norms (primarily civility and intellectual charity) and rigorous enforcement.
[1] I have a rule of not naming this family of subreddits on HN or other fora, because maintaining the community quality is a delicate balance and the average HNer would both find it attractive and utterly ruin it in large enough numbers.
OTOH, clearly you read this comment, and if even one person like you was prevented from ending up on that forum, it's worth it 1000x over.
Your comment says:
> If the author could use examples from reddit to illustrate their point, it'd be great
My comment did the exact thing you had already complained about, and my footnote was explicitly addressing the reason for this gap.
It's an incredibly bizarre look to lash out childishly because you can't follow the conversation well enough to remember what you wrote in your previous comment.
For me, it actually changed my mindset before I had access to the downvote button. The result is that I think more carefully about how I phrase things, and also that I've never used the downvote (at least not intentionally, but it's easy to fat-finger these teensy buttons on mobile devices) because I remember how it made me feel, and because upvotes are usually enough to percolate the good stuff upward. Having said that, I've seen a lot of cases over the years where the downvote button did good things to a thread, it often does a good job of sorting by relevance and helpfulness, it often lets people know when they're getting out of line, and for me personally it helped me be a better commenter. But I first had to get to the point where I admitted I had room to improve, and that took time and some downvotes.
Lately I've been thinking about changing my personal policy and using the downvote button every once in a while, because over time I can see some of the upside to the downvote. So far though, I've often been glad that other people do it so I don't ever have to.
That whatever they said was legit unpopular is vastly more likely.
That's only one time I definitely know I was getting downvoted with alt accounts, but it really sucks. And now how do I know it hasn't happened several times since except with someone who doesn't have an inflated enough ego that they need to PM me proof of it.
And my own innocuous comments tend to be “1” rather than anything negative. If downvotes rings were more common you’d expect more negative karma comments.
But I am saying that their hesitancy is real, and is widely shared. It's an inescapable consequence of having downvotes. HN does it best, by gating downvoting privileges to accounts in good standing but even then it's not easy.
That being said, for all its faults, I would expect that reddit does indeed have more productive discourse than most other (non-HN) social media platforms, particularly Twitter with its enforcement of shallow/short-form comments. /r/the_donald is obviously an extreme example of an alt-right cesspool, but it's not obvious that it was less polite or constructive than the equivalent communities on other platforms.
I have never visited that subreddit, but since the rest of the world, downvote button or not, was also not really involved in a constructive exchange of ideas on that topic - I do not see the point here. Emotional topics are hard to discuss, if the people involved use it to vent out emotions and to evangelize.
This site is every bit as echo chamber, “curated”, and intentionally suppressive to anything but a specific viewpoint.
If anyone doesn’t think so, go make steel man arguments against climate tax policy and let’s see how that goes for you.
The up/down vote system is the tool to implement ideological purity. And here the gray/fade system is a bandwagon signal.
This is all known, to people on the outside of the “target audience”.
But that still doesn't invalidate what GP was saying. They perceive a difficulty in contributing to the conversation because they're afraid of being downvoted. You're telling them not to worry and that they'll be fine ... but it's still a legitimate concern for them and for many other people who lurk and don't participate in the conversation directly. And there are plenty of lurkers. In my limited experience of receiving visitors from HN on my website, the number of clicks is 100x the number of comments on the thread.
And this is exactly why Facebook doesn't have a downvote button. It's trivial to add it. I've even seen it implemented in internal versions. But it only takes a couple of bad experiences of being downvoted for a user to get turned off from the platform. TFA does some handwaving about how it'll save democracy, but it's a crock of shit. All it does is make fewer people participate. crazy_horse tried to tell you that. The solution to saving democracy isn't reducing participation.
What's more, this experiment of having downvotes does exist. It's called reddit. Plenty of people use it. If the author could use examples from reddit to illustrate their point, it'd be great. Like the thriving, polite, constructive exchange of ideas that took place on /r/the_donald for instance?