> Say something the majority dont like and you're downvoted into oblivion

So? That's how every society works everywhere. Don't disturb the peace. You are an adult. You're entitled to your opinion, but you should have the courage of your convictions. Reddit is no different from other social media platforms in this regard, even HN.

Downvotes are not a productive means of communication. If you have problems with my views be an adult and oppose my views rationally. Otherwise ignore me and move on. Having any form of social credit score that can be abused to silence others is quite literally a pillar of authoritarianism and de-incentivizes the free flow of ideas if they disagree with established groupthink. It doesn’t matter if the majority believes it to be true. At one time the majority believed the Earth to be flat.

Thankfully HN doesn’t fall into this hole as deeply as Reddit, due in part to the steeper requirements to participate in downvoting and simply how varied the opinions are here. Not to mention HN doesn’t have a cabal of “powermods” forcing subreddits to follow their own agenda.

Guess you haven’t criticized Californian way of business and was banned by d*** for it yet.

Nothing of value lost with the user full of internet-points. Though I’m no reddit user (never was), so it may be really worse there, but this was already too much bullshit for my post-communist easter-european taste.

We can take things in stride at the same time as wishing for a more enlightened discourse

> So?

The issue is that we lose a forum for clearly examining and correcting our own beliefs, be they popular or unpopular.

This is the echo-chamber effect, and it's the antithesis of curious discussion.

That's not how for example newspapers work. They will publish opinion pieces from people and with opinions that they themselves strongly disagree with, because they see it as their duty to promote freedom of speech and a healthy public debate.

Or parliament debates, where representatives for smaller parties get to have their say on equal terms as the big dogs.

Some countries even force radio and TV stations to air a certain amount of time to each candidate for their propaganda before an election (which can be hundreds of people).

I'm happy to say that even HN largely doesn't work like that: many of us upvote comments with which we disagree because they are well thought-out or interesting, and made us reconsider our viewpoints, even if we ultimately settled on the same viewpoint as before.

Or at minimum we don't downvote as knee-jerk psychological defense mechanism.

And Dang doesn't go around removing comments and commenters he philosophically disagrees with either, even when they're obviously wrong or hyper-emotional, so long as they're not hurting the community.

I think the ability to block/ignore users would be much better than having down votes. If some poster is simply insufferable to a person, better that they have the ability to block than that they silence by downvoting.

And upvoting people you disagree with if they move the discussion forward in a good way is something we all should do, but it is a struggle.

If people on 4chan don't like what you say, your post dies after about 15 minutes so I don't understand what your point about that is.

Which is worse, your post literally disappearing, or having a big negative number next to it. Which is less censorship?