I get what you may aspire to have happen on this site, but it does not live up to those ideals. Probably thousands of people, sock puppets, and bots brigade in favor of their own opinions, regardless of what the rules say. The only people who will really feel left out by this are the ones like myself who don't agree "enough" with the hive mind. I would care a lot less if basic features of the site were not gated by points, as well. Half of the time I feel like I wandered into Reddit.
I reckon that the people who don't make this complaint are the ones who just agree with the hive mind and don't suffer downvotes. I know for a fact I could simply state the exact opposite of what I do in many cases, in the same abrasive style, and get at least neutral treatment. You won't even let my honest constructive criticism here go without downvotes. You aren't the least bit curious what normal users like me go through. You want to prescribe a view of my experience according to your own imagination.
The thing is, everyone feels like that when they are strongly committed to a particular ideology. Dang has written several times about the "notice-dislike bias" [1], in which you notice more strongly the views you most dislike, and feel like the environment is dominated by those views. We know that effect is real by the fact that we are routinely accused of “putting our thumb on the scale” in favour of the present US administration or in support of the politics favoured by Silicon Valley power brokers, which we don't do and which we know very well would destroy HN (and thus, our jobs) if we did.
Dang and I have been doing this job in some form for many years and we know more than anything else that the only way to keep HN thriving is to make it a place where all reasonable points of view can be shared and discussed. Yes, the community's ideology skews moderately left-libertarian, which you would expect of a community dominated by technology industry employees. But several of the biggest figures on leader board are notable for espousing conservative/libertarian positions, and we always want the spectrum of views to represented here, otherwise there'd be little to discuss.
Addressing some of your key points:
> I get what you may aspire to have happen on this site, but it does not live up to those ideals
Nothing in life ever lives up to ideals :) We can only try and push things in the right direction. The outcome will always be messy and imperfect, and we can only ever hope to make it less imperfect than it would be without our interventions. We think we get things about right if we're criticized roughly equally from either side.
> Probably thousands of people, sock puppets, and bots brigade in favor of their own opinions, regardless of what the rules say
We've become pretty good at detecting these and killing their posts; it's surprisingly easy to detect manipulation once you've spent enough time reading all the threads and knowing what authentic discussion looks like.
> The only people who will really feel left out by this are the ones like myself who don't agree "enough" with the hive mind.
> I would care a lot less if basic features of the site were not gated by points, as well.
We have to have some way of determining that people are committed to contributing positively to the community before unlocking privileges that influence what gets seen on the site.
> Half of the time I feel like I wandered into Reddit.
People have been saying this since 2007 :)
> I reckon that the people who don't make this complaint are the ones who just agree with the hive mind and don't suffer downvotes
No, plenty of people take pride in being at odds with the majority. They accept that they're going to get downvotes and accept them with a little pride.
That said, we don't like to see unfair voting on HN, and any time you feel a comment has been unfairly downvoted, you're welcome to email us ([email protected]) to point it out and we can look into it.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The people who don’t make this complaint are those who use the site as intended - for curious conversation rather than ideological battle.