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Ask HN: Do HN's karma system penalize dissent?

14 points by ainiriand ↗ HN
When comenting and sending opinions you often get penalized when your opinions are not aligned with the majority. Is this an unconscious censorship system? Are we holding ourselves from opinions that can cause confrontation just to not get downvotes?

12 comments

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LoneWolf
I would say it may depend on the person, at least in my case I say whatever I think and believe without caring if I get downvoted or not, of course if you care a lot about that little number in the upper right corner then yes it is more likely that you hold your opinion back to avoid see it lower. Still I would say most people do not care about it.
ainiriand
When that number allows access to certain features or capabilities that you want, then it becomes important.
GFK_of_xmaspast
What features are those? As far as I know all you get are: * upvotes at 15 or so * downvotes at 500 * maybe flagging comes in somewhere?

If it's the former, 15 points is a pretty low bar to meet (and I say this as someone who has posted their share of heterodox opinions, and outright shitposts). If it's the latter, aren't you being a little hypocritical in wanting those, given that you posted this thread?

ainiriand
Well, I think that trying to get there (500) is going to take a big amount of politically correct comments. I don't know how much the people in HN want that utility, but conflicting with someone can garantee you a quite few downvotes.
GFK_of_xmaspast
Have you considered trying to make good solid technical posts about any of a variety of topics.
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mbrock
I rarely see well-written comments downvoted to the point where you could talk about censorship. It doesn't seem like necessarily a problem to incentivize people with controversial opinions to use wit, politeness, or humor to make their points.
muzani
Some things are deeply emotional and will attract downvotes no matter how intelligent the group is. E.g. religion, politics, gender issues.
brudgers
A while back I decided to treat downvotes as editorial feedback -- to treat downvotes as a measure of how well I, as an author, connected with my readers as an audience. Maybe I wasn't clear in saying what I was trying to say, maybe I was technically wrong, maybe what I said was just stupid or unproductive or mean [but to be clear there's never been a maybe about a fuck-you-go-ahead-and-downvote-me-post, I just kinda' stopped making them].

Anyway, I started editing my posts to make them clearer or correct facts or add supporting details when those things would make them better. Then I started deleting my posts when they flat out sucked. And then I got better at realizing a was going to suck as I was writing it and so I got in the habit of putting down the shovel when my writing was digging a hole and letting it go.

While I was learning all this I still visited parts of the internet where being an asshole is not only accepted, but often a high form of enterainment, i.e. I just wasn't an asshole on Hacker News. Anyway, as I came to believe [perhaps mistakenly] that my writing was improving, I found that writing to tell people that they are wrong on the internet [see xkcd386] less pleasurable than writing readers actually like to read.

It's "karma" and HN's karma system tends over time to disincentivize bad behavior in the context of HN. Explicitly seeking confrontation, is probably to a first approximation one of those.

[0]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Graham's_Hierarchy_o...

[1]: http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html

AnimalMuppet
My impression is that you can dissent from the majority (at least on technical subjects) as long as you have something informative to say. If you're going to say "Haskell is a lousy language", that's not informative. If you're going to say "Haskell doesn't work well in situations where you really need X, and such environments exist, for example in Y", then you're giving actual information, and are (usually) not downvoted.

I must say, however, that it seems to me that this is less true than it was a year ago. It's still mostly true, but it feels to me like we're starting to lose some of what makes HN such a worthwhile place.

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ainiriand
I agree 100% in what you say. But there are many articles that do not fall purely under technological subjects. There are a lot of information about Apple that causes controversy. If you want to state a position in this matter you are going to get downvotes unless you please everyone reading. You can't critizice Steve Jobs saying that the real genius behind Apple was Wozniak and the designer of the iPod. This is just and example. Another example would be critizice the FBI or CIA politics or USA foreign relations. Do you understand my line of thought?