A polite well worded post that disagrees with the mainstream will indeed still exist, but it will be moderated to unreadably transparent and hidden by default. It’s not a great experience.

Meanwhile personal attacks and hyperbole regarding Elon Musk and Trump have become very common on HN.

> A polite well worded post that disagrees with the mainstream will indeed still exist, but it will be moderated to unreadably transparent and hidden by default. It’s not a great experience.

Speaking from personal experience only: I have mostly not observed "polite, well-worded posts disagreeing with the mainstream" get downvoted to oblivion, unless some other factor also applies, such as that they're also things that seem likely to lead to a rehashed old-as-the-hills disagreement with no new information that will not on balance change any minds.

If you post (by way of example only, please observe the use-mention distinction here) a polite version of "ads are good and adblockers are stealing", and get a massive pile of downvotes, I think that's a reasonable signal that the community isn't interested in seeing iteration 47,902 of that argument, and has no expectation that anything new will come out of that argument. If you have something new to say on that topic that is likely to lead into new and interesting arguments, at this point you would need to signpost that heavily, prefacing it with some equivalent of "Please note that I'm aware this is an age-old argument, but I think I have a new point to make that is worth considering", and then actually make a new point, at which point I think you're less likely to get downvoted to oblivion.

Personally, I don't downvote "mere" disagreement. I downvote (among other things) what seems to me to be uninteresting or thoughtless or insufficiently diligent disagreement, or factually incorrect information, or anything that seems like a discussion that spawned from it will not be interesting.

Now, that said, another factor here is that some people posting on political topics in particular believe they're making "polite well-worded posts disagreeing with the mainstream", and others do not share that belief and flag it to oblivion. For example, posts expressing bigotry mostly get flagged, no matter how surface-level "polite" they are.

> If you post (by way of example only, please observe the use-mention distinction here) a polite version of "ads are good and adblockers are stealing", and get a massive pile of downvotes...

Sure, I imagine the grandparent poster means arguing something like "limiting access for extensons is good because they're often used to steal financial assets". Old extensions are sold, or cracked and updated to inclue malware.

I want to avoid letting a meta-level conversation slip into object-level. But using the object-level as an example, I would expect a comment that acknowledges the types of things that are hard to build with Manifest V3, particularly more advanced adblocking, and acknowledges that there need to be solutions for those things, and makes the point that letting extensions be all-powerful does lead to problems and that also needs solving, would not get downvoted to oblivion. That's much more nuanced than, for instance, suggesting that Manifest V3 is an unalloyed good with zero problems, which I would expect to get downvoted.

> acknowledges that there need to be solutions for those things

Why is this required, in order not for the comment to be downvoted to oblivion? You may be confusing bias with nuance.

I'm giving an example, which to some degree was meant as an existence proof of a way to support an unpopular position without getting massive downvotes. "X is entirely good with no problems whatsoever" being replaced by "I think the benefits of X outweigh the costs, and here's some acknowledgement of the costs". I'm not trying to suggest only one possible way to do that, or only one pattern to follow. (This is one danger of using an object-level example.)

OK. Yes I agree there’s a cost to anything and acknowledging that is important.

Downvoting and flagging is not moderation.

Flagging does seem to primarily be a tool for moderation. But for comments, at least, I've mostly not observed flagging being used to hide things that shouldn't be; if anything, I think flagging is underused on comments.

(It's still regularly abused on stories as a downvote, perhaps in part because stories don't have downvotes. HN sometimes "rescues" stories that get over-flagged, but it's still a problem.)

Flagging isn’t done by moderators, it’s done by regular HN users.

I didn't say it was done by moderators, I said it was a tool for moderation. Flagging is the means by which regular HN users perform moderation activities, in addition to the actions available to the moderators.

Ok, I see. I understood “moderation policies” upthread to refer to what guides the actions of the moderators.

Fair enough, I can see from the thread how that interpretation could arise. I would definitely interpret "moderation policy" to be policy implemented by moderators. In this case, I was responding to the statement that "flagging is not moderation", and I thought it was useful to distinguish that flagging semantically is a kind of moderation (done by users rather than by moderators).

For me the difference is that moderation by moderators is (usually) guided by some content policy, and one can disagree about the biases of the specific content policy, or disagree about applying a content policy based on topics and themes at all (as opposed to based on mere style and civility). With user actions, there is no predefined content policy, it’s just how the set of users who happen to read the specific thread or comment happen to feel.

Personally, I’d prefer no up-/downvoting and flagging at all (or flagging only to alert moderators), and purely chronological threading. But I also think that active moderation and crowd-sourced ranking mechanics are two different things.

> Personally, I’d prefer no up-/downvoting and flagging at all (or flagging only to alert moderators), and purely chronological threading.

I think that's a very different kind of forum, and it needs different tools to be usable, and it more quickly fails into unusability.

It’s how old-style forums work, and I’m still on a couple of them. It functions quite well with the right moderation.

It can work, but I think it's harder to scale to something the size of HN without losing some of the important properties HN has.

For example, I think it's useful that on balance the top few comments and their discussion are likely to be interesting, and the last few comments are unlikely to be interesting.

As someone who actively believes Manifest V3 is good for users, I second this: my opinion is not suppressed by this forum. It's simply unpopular among nerds, the population to whom this forum is aimed.