>> I usually and deliberately poke popular opinions to get a good discussion out of it and it has been disappointing.

Perhaps it's apparent on some level to your audience that you're doing this to raise some sort response, not because you have a strong affinity for a particular position? The last thing I want to do is gorge on the junkfood emotion of false outrage.

We can use above comment as an example. I disagree with GP, my experience has been totally opposite lately on HN. That's genuine and not trying to evoke rage or what-have-you. Sometimes, I poke to see what the opposing views are. X is all the rage right now. So, if there is a thread about it, I'll ask or point to all the ways you can shoot yourself in the foot with X.

> Diverse views are not celebrated and encouraged.

Can you elaborate? Are they downvoted, or just not presented in the first place?

He's full of beans, man. This site loves contrarian views, so long as they're even slightly supported by facts or anecdata.

The main thing that gets downvoted is angry tirades without evidence, and it happens to most political views/religious views no matter what side they're on.

You’re assuming everyone in HN downvotes just like you. How do you know that?

You can see which comments get downvoted, read them and thus learn others preferences.

How do you downvote ?

I only have an up arrow.

You need 500 karma to do it

Do you know how the flag-function works? Sometimes I'm able to flag comments, other times the button isn't present.

It looks like I can only flag comments once I tap reply?

You apparently also need 31 karma to do so https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439437

I'm just going by the posts I've seen dead and grayed out

Usually it's flame wars and nonsensical rants where the commenter appears to be off their medication

Meanwhile people are happy to have all sorts of conversations that will get you canceled elsewhere about gender, race, and vaccines (so long as the conversations are analytical anyway)

Yea sure. I won't give specific examples, otherwise the discussion will get derailed into bickering about extreme specifics to overthrow overall argument.

Try to see which comments are flagged and analyze why should they be flagged because of politics, spam, rudeness, ideology, not-factual, bigotry, etc. I'd say a significant portion of them are completely legitimate or interesting, just doesn't fit the ideology/politics here.

It's also possible to that I've changed, may be taken a red pill, I try to have a super sensitive self-introspection and try to objectively analyze what went wrong in flagged or downvoted comments.

Anyways, it's been mostly nice and to be honest, addicting. I still continue to visit HN, but will probably dial it back way down and just read weekly newsletters and avoid exposing myself to extreme-ideological positions here.

> I won't give specific examples

That's too bad! I usually find honing in on specific examples as the most effective way to explore a topic. But I understand the possibility that it could take the conversation down a rabbit hole.

> I'd say a significant portion of them are completely legitimate or interesting, just doesn't fit the ideology/politics here

I've yet to come across many flagged comments (or had any of my own flagged) but this feels like a strange motivation on its own. I feel like flagging should be reserved for comments that break the site guidelines?

If your position is rational and well presented and curious conversation (e.g. no hoaxes or 2nd hand information) than just post it. That it is not celebrated seems an emotional response -why should people celebrate any position here?- Unless you feel upvotes/downvotes are the measure of a comment.

It's easy to get lots of upvotes. Just post praise and self-reinforcing comments and you'll get boatload upvotes. Don't care, ultimately, it is the information that goes into the brain matter that I want to benefit from.

I've come to believe that quality of discourse declines as communities grow in size and scope regardless of medium.

What topics in particular do you find are insufficently diverse of opinions here? Let's discuss them here and now.

I get it. I wasn't really advocating for spending more time on HN. For me it's just the one piece of "social media" that I can consume responsibly. Most things go way over my head anyway so I don't get drawn into lengthy discussions. Other things are just interesting little bits of information that usually don't devolve into a rabbit hole of any kind. Occasionally I do get lost in a thread but that's an ok price to pay for me. It works for me because I'm not the kind of person smart enough to waste too much time on HN :)