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I think that the point of the downvote button on HN is to reduce the visibility of comments that don't contribute to the discourse, not to dismiss dissenting op
by JamilD 10y ago
I think that the point of the downvote button on HN is to reduce the visibility of comments that don't contribute to the discourse, not to dismiss dissenting opinions.
This is helped by the fact that it's used sparingly and is only available to people with a certain karma threshold (an imperfect metric, but one that's worked reasonably well so far)
- nv-vn 10y agoAgreed, the karma barrier does help a decent amount. But even on HackerNews I see the same "downvoting mob mentality" occasionally where all comments expressing certain views or disagreeing with comments of more popular users are reduced in visibility because of down voting. In a way, it gives the higher ranked users a platform to push their own posts higher/other posts lower, not unlike the way capitalism can widen economic gaps between the rich and the poor. While it is helpful to hide comments that don't have much to do with the discussion, upvoting related comments has the same effect without the downside of making the comment invisible to people who want to see it and without impacting the user's status on HN.