What is wrong with HN that simple questions with no obvious agenda are getting downvotes? It's becoming impossible to have even a simple conversation here any more.

(sorry, yes, rant ..., and far more deserving of downvotes than the parent)

Not to open up a whole other can of worms here, but I've heard people blame Reddit for an influx of downvote brigade types.

Regardless of where they're coming from, I know what you mean. I wish at the very least we'd see more questions or rebuttals or whatever being replied to the posters.

New people (I am one of them as you will see if you go to my page) do not have the ability to down vote. From what I understand, the assumption is that by the time people get to the magic number (currently 500 I believe), they will have been here long enough to understand what to down vote.

I'd say the best recourse we have available is to set showdead to yes. I think it is quite obvious that we are not supposed to down vote things just because we disagree.

I can imagine a system like stack overflow where down voting a top level comment takes away like a tenth of a point from the down voter so if the down voter does nothing but down vote, they'll ultimately lose the privilege.

See any given DMCA takedown request for Google to filter search results. There's more than 1.5m to look through.

https://chillingeffects.org/notice.cgi

Aside from the fact that Google doesn't have much choice WRT to DMCA and it's the US government fault, there's this funny thing about ChillingEffect that it doesn't really censor that much.

For instance, let me search for "Edge of Tomorrow full movie". At the bottom of the page I can see that some results were removed due to DMCA request. There's a link to the complaint:

http://www.chillingeffects.org/notice.cgi?sID=1802711

Voilà! All the "censored" links enumerated right there (many of them working).

Censorshop by Google : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google

In addition to "Right to be forgotten" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten

Thanks for the Wikipedia link. There are many intersting cases I haven't heard about. But my general impression is that Google is not giving in to censorship requests easily and try to go around them in any way possible. See the DMCA "censored results" that are available one click away at ChillingEffects.

As for "Right to be forgotten", I'm happy to see they're fighting it in whatever way they can.

I'm not saying Google is crystal clear. I just don't see obvious signs of malice that is often attributed to it by people here.