There are threads where expressing a well formed, well reasoned, well supported but contrary opinion runs the risk of downvotes to greyness. The root of the problem is inevitably that the topic of the thread is a poor fit for HN at that particular point in time [and perhaps always].

A symptom of the problem is that such threads tempt so many people to express their opinion for the sake of expressing it. I get lured in sometimes too. But when I can stop myself, I just flag the thread. And if I need to feel better, maybe I go through and down vote comments I disagree with in lieu of telling people their political, economic, or ethical views are wrong.

That's better than me just adding to the noise and heat and lack of civility. Downvotes are socially acceptable. So are upvotes.

What about topics that are important and relevant to HN but invoke a polarised opinion on HN?

My concerns can be summarized into a single question - If HN had existed historically with the rules as they exist currently, would Georg Cantor have thrived in it?

> If HN had existed historically with the rules as they exist currently, would Georg Cantor have thrived in it?

I doubt it. Unconventional ideas that are orders of magnitude less radical than Cantor's get reduced to convention and dismissed all the time on HN. It's dismaying. But it is what human beings do, and especially what human beings in groups do. HN can't change that by proclaiming rules. Maybe we can mitigate it a little, such as by asking people to avoid gratuitous negativity.

I flag bad threads. To me if a thread is producing bad behavior then it's bad. Most of the threads that fall into the category of important and bad are posted for discussion elsewhere.

My experience tends to be that if you can hold a dissenting opinion respectfully, and back up your assertions, HN treats it favorably in the long run.

Holding a dissenting opinion without being willing to defend it with awareness of your audience's hostility to your ideas rarely goes over well in any forum, though.

I think you're being a bit optimistic here. Downvotes will happen regardless of how well reasoned your argument is, and they'll come in a hurry if you hold an unpopular opinion on a sensitive/political subject. It's definitely my biggest gripe with HN -- there's too much of a political echo chamber here.

> Downvotes will happen regardless of how well reasoned your argument is

Some will, but its very rare that I've seen posts retain a net of negative moderation when they contribute substantially, regardless of the side of an issue they are on (though I've seen controversial-but-substantial comments quickly get heavily downvoted before recovering.)

And I've seen this on every side of issues -- often to opposing posts in the same discussion -- so I don't think its an "echo-chamber" effect, but more that certain topics bringout more kneejerk negative responses from people on either side.

(Its funny that, in regard to accusations of HN being an echo chamber or hivemind, I've seen various posters proclaim with confidence that it was -- and that that hivemind was, variously, liberal, leftist, libertarian, capitalist, pro-corporate, anti-corporate, and in support or opposition to various companies, and any of a number of other things. I think people are way to quick to equate some people disagreeing with or downvoting their posts to HN being a hivemind biased against them.)

Bad threads produce bad behavior. By definition. When I see it happening, I flag the thread. Sometimes despite wishing that there could be a positive discussion of the subject because the subject is relevant and important and intellectually interesting.

I think "Maybe next time it comes up the comments won't devolve."

My unpopular opinions frequently get early downvotes, but it seems that it'll swing back into the black given enough time/eyeballs, if I've made a good argument.

Of particular note, sometimes expressing an unpopular opinion on a sensitive subject (or a subject on which some people have very strong feelings, even if it's not sensitive to most people) can trigger a cascade of "revenge downvotes". So while the original comment might get upvoted back to positive, comments on completely unrelated topics might pick up undeserved downvotes.

I once had a few week period where I noticed the majority of my comments drop by exactly 2 karma, usually around the same time of day, regardless of how many upvotes they'd received or how heavily trafficked the thread was. My best guess is that I'd upset two people (or one person with two accounts) and they kept clicking back on my profile until they got bored with it.

> My experience tends to be that if you can hold a dissenting opinion respectfully, and back up your assertions, HN treats it favorably in the long run.

I think "in the long run" is key here.

When I make a comment that challenges some band of partisans, but strikes a factual tone, my observations is that it initially gets downvotes (presumably from the partisans who are hovering over the thread/story), but in the end gets moderated highly.

Try saying anything critical about Apple and see if this strategy works out in practice.

Well, I just checked, and my last comment critical of Apple (and not even charitably so) is currently at +97 karma, so I'm not quite sure the argument holds much weight.

Exactly. Doing a poor job of critiquing Apple will garner downvotes. Writing a well-reasoned and supported argument critiquing Apple will get upvotes.

Thanks for taking the time to look into this. I am afraid it does not address the wider concern I have of which criticquing Apple is a specific example.

On topics where there is a deep skew in the opinion held by the HN readerbase, it is probabilistically likely that going against the widely held view will receive more downvotes. This has a chilling effect on expressing dissent. Of course there will be people who will be able to mitigate this with their gravitas and eloquence. But it would be better if we can come up with a scheme where we lower the burden on people holding a dissenting opinion.

I've made many negative comments about Apple, Facebook, MS, Google, etc and did not receive downvotes for them.

If HN is tribal then attacking one tribe while praising the others might be a method to farm positive karma.

I've been pointing out problems with Apple and seen little punishment.

Then again I am kind of thoughtful when I do and often make sure to point out that I like Apple, and recommend it to others, -I just personally find their products annoying to use for specific reasons

I think true criticism is treated well (for example, discussing validity of walled garden in app store). It's the trollish comments, like calling Apple users sheep or ignorant hipsters that thrown money away, that are problematic.

I've been very critical of Apple in this forum, and it doesn't seem to have hurt my karma too much.

I think the topic is also important. Was the topic about a positive apple article, or a positive android or windows topic? You are more likely to draw a crowd that relates to the title's indicated company. Having a negative view point about windows is sure to get a better response in a topic that is praising an apple product.

I'm making assumptions here on anecdotes of course.

Interesting, what if in downvoting a comment you had to pick a reason? What are all the reasons one would downvote something?

"I do not agree" "I do not believe this adds value" "Inappropriate conduct" "I think you are being mean / rude" "Bad attempt at funny" "Off topic to parent" "Off topic to post" "Difficult to understand/Noise"

Slashdot does this.

What generally happens is that instead of one argument about been downvoted/upvoted you end up with even more arguments about whether something is +5 funny or whatever.

I've no idea how you solve this in the general case tbh.

Part of that though is that +1 Funny doesn't add to your slashdot karma. So people sometimes "upvote to denigrate" because you can only get +5 anyway, a silly comment can get +5 Funny without actually rewarding the commenter (mocks the comment) - you can see this when replies get +5 Insightful or +5 Informative and are very contrary to the original comment.

Personally, I like the idea of having qualifiers on the downvote without one on the upvote - makes you think a little bit before downvoting... plus the vote buttons are ridiculously small on an mobile Safari - so having to click twice would prevent accidental downvotes.

So far, while it may not be ideal, I think HN actually hits pretty close to the sweet spot.

thanks i'll check it out. I wasn't thinking to show the stats to others, possibly to provide feedback to the poster that they're 'above average' on the 'mean' or 'not relevant', etc scale.

I havent put a lot of thought into an ideal solution to this problem. But heres the best I have so far. Change the definition of karma to capture notability which would be a monotonically increasing number. So when a person mark a comment as notable, it increases your karma score by 1. Seperately have a agree / disagree score per comment whose lifetime is limited to a particular thread. Within a thread a reader can use the agree / disagree scores of comment to selectively read both sides of the debate.

I don't have a strong opinion on whether that'd work, but it sounds a lot like the Slashdot comment moderation system. Perhaps someone with a good level of experience of posting on Slashdot can help shed some light on how it works out in practice.

I think it works well (been reading and posting to /. for about 15 years), and if I designed a forum then it'd work the same way. The trick is it forces you to justify your opinion in some way. There isn't a "-1 Disagree" or "+1 Right On" so to mod a comment you have to find some actual flaw with it, or justify why you think it should be raised above the rest. If you pick a dumb reason that clearly can't be justified based on the text, meta-moderators will wash things out later.

That said, it's not perfect. There are -1 Overrated and +1 Underrated mods. I would not have these if I was king for a day, because:

• They apparently somehow bypass meta-moderation, or have done in the past (!) so not surprisingly they get abused a lot

• They are vague and don't force you to justify what's good or bad about a post, in many cases I have seen abuse of these mod types devolve into reddit style agree/disagree modding

• They don't adjust the adjective that goes with the post, so for a long time and maybe still now you can get posts like +5 Troll or -1 Insightful, which is just confusing and generally bogus

Stripping out Underrated and Overrated would improve things a lot. I'd maybe make +1 Funny count for karma too because funny posts deliver a lot of value to the slashdot reading experience, IMO, and I see no problem with encouraging them.

I think the balance of adjectives is important though. There is no -1 Wrong or -1 Misinformed mod and that's important. If someone posts something polite, earnest and completely wrong there's no justifiable word to mod them down with. Instead you have to wait for a reply to correct them and then mod that up as Informative, Insightful etc.

Another idea is to make down voting cost karma. Stackoverflow does this.

Downvotes not being for disagreement is an absurd redditism. Upvotes are used for agreement, so it is only natural that downvotes are used for disagreement.

PG has stated in the past that downvoting things you disagree with is proper usage on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658691

I don't know if 'dang has changed this policy, but if so I haven't heard about it.

I would think that it would be fairly obvious that trying to assert that down-votes are not for disagreement is extremely futile. It's human nature to react to things they disagree with, and if down-votes don't mean disagree... then what? People aren't allowed to disagree? The only way to disagree is to actually invest significant amounts of your time?

Sounds great in theory. But then a small number of zealots can derail just about every thread with minimal effort. I image it would really degrade a community in a heartbeat. So it's probably a good thing nobody has found a way to enforce such a policy.

You can downvote zealotry and flawed arguments without downvoting mundane disagreement.

I feel like two separate point counters for each post would work best. One for well thought out post, and one for disagreement. They wouldn't affect each others score, and only the positive point counter would determine the ranking of the score.