I don't really care enough to self-censor and I often play a game of negative karma with myself here. To motivate myself to finish the comment I know won't be

I don't really care enough to self-censor and I often play a game of negative karma with myself here. To motivate myself to finish the comment I know won't be taken well in the average I first remind myself that the point of my comment isn't to cater to the consensus of the majority of the HN crowd but the reason I started writing it was because I felt something needed to be said and if there is one other person who finds my comment valuable, I have succeeded regardless of everything else. Secondly, in entering the game of negative karma I expect downvotes with the idea that the more I get the more sure I am I did strike the right chord there. It doesn't always work and I get a wave of upvotes instead, but you get the idea. I rarely look back except when my karma changes a lot overnight which is when I might take a look at what happened. Note that I don't, or at least I don't intend to, troll, insult, or talk off-topic in order to hog downvotes for my game. The downvotes themselves aren't the goal: I just consider them an indicator of success when writing a comment I'm pretty sure I won't be getting many upvotes either. It's like targetting controversy. Ideally, I aim to make remarks that question the status quo or find blind spots in collective assumptions. To close, I'm thinking about your question in the end. I think that self-censorship is about the need to belong. If you're an independent individualist you have no need for self-censorship because you don't care if people were to oust you because of what you said. Yet humans need that feeling of belonging which I think is best reserved for people closest in your life. You can shrug off a lot of thoughts when it comes to your spouse, your kids, or good friends -- thoughts that you could defend and question till the end in principle, but because principles are merely mental tools you know you can afford to shrug off a few of them as between you and these people you (hopefully) have something that goes beyond mere mental gymnastics.