Strongly agreed. If I recall HN also has some built in functionality that downranks posts when the comments on it come in at high volume, indicating some level

Strongly agreed. If I recall HN also has some built in functionality that downranks posts when the comments on it come in at high volume, indicating some level of flame war. I get the motivations behind both, and in some situations it works great. But a lot of the time it helps to enforce a monoculture on the site: any disagreement, particularly strong disagreement, is seen as a negative signal and is vanished from the site. Next time you see a post about, say, women software engineers, you’ll be able to watch it happen in real time.