The upvotes do decide here, though. Mods rarely manually pull posts that aren't spam. Most are flagged by users, which either kills them or pushes them into the

The upvotes do decide here, though. Mods rarely manually pull posts that aren't spam. Most are flagged by users, which either kills them or pushes them into the bottom of the rankings. And at least HN is clear about where the moderators stand. Meritocracy doesn't function. Either you have reddit, where users circlejerk into oblivion in smaller communities because votes don't matter (and larger communities don't work either, because their bigger mod teams do things like [1,2,3]) or you have StackOverflow, where upvotes and downvotes are extremely powerful and either allow you a lot of power or allow you to zap others and keep them in line. HN allows you to easily amass some karma so you can say something that isn't in line with others' opinions. Sometimes people will even upvote you and make your minority opinion prominent. Downvoting requires at least 500 karma, making sure you have the lay of the land down (and prevents spam accounts from taking down comments immediately). HN has a lot of transparency. Try enabling "showdead" in your profile. Forget uneddit, that's built in on HN. We're not inmates. We're here for the conversation. We like cool stuff and we like to talk about it. [1]: https://archive.is/CFKgq https://archive.is/CFKgq [2]: https://i.imgur.com/EWVH9RW.jpg https://i.imgur.com/EWVH9RW.jpg [3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/3hewwm/misc_i_was_banned_from_roffmychest_for_submitting/ https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/3hewwm/misc...