Just the mere fact of people downvoting you for what you wrote validates what you've said: I agree with you 100%. After reading so much social media which is

Just the mere fact of people downvoting you for what you wrote validates what you've said: I agree with you 100%. After reading so much social media which is designed to increase one's professional reputation, ego and social status like facebook and HN (as well as main stream news about celebrities and politicians), it's grounding and humanizing to go to a place like /b/ where you can't maintain a reputation. You can actually be honest and get an honest human response. This was one of moot's main reasons for keeping it going. I chat there with suicidal people, people afraid to go to doctors, people abused and neglected by their parents, people trying drugs, people seeking spirituality, homosexuals from small towns, all afraid to speak up in public, their doctors, their schools. I hate the racism there. The sexism is not great. I especially the deplore the animal torture. But even real-life socializing isn't as intimate and bold as anonymous socializing. And what people need to remember is that a .gif of a scumbag who rigged a clothesline to drown a dog every time it moves is just a picture. The disgusting act has already been done. Moreover, these images are evidence that bad things happen and we can feel justified in doing something about them in real-life instead of only acting on fear. I need to look past all of that crap in order to have actual human connections I can't get in real life or online. And so do the people on the other end of my connections. Because mainstream social life has failed us. When I said you can't maintain a reputation on /b/, though, there are some workarounds: People create labels for their groups like gamergate and anonymous that leak out into the rest of the world. There are plenty of those people who obviously aren't satisfied to have intimate, anonymous conversation and have bigger axes to grind. They wreck the environment and as the saying goes, "This is why we can't have nice things." I could see all of that being too damn much of a toll to take on moot, and I don't require of him that he maintain any particular ideals. I also heard other things, but who knows. > people will just try to ban/downvote you into oblivion instead of discussing anything Yes, especially on HN and reddit, voting is not used to eliminate spam and off-topic, but to indicate consensus values and idols. So even if you're right, if you don't validate the hivemind, you get downvoted. You could tell the world the Earth is round during the dark ages and get downvoted. If you're a recognizable name on HN, you instantly get upvoted. It's the same chickenshit conformity that creates the capitalistic hierarchy in mainstream social life.