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Every social group eventually uses the weapon of censorship. It's not just government...even without a proper institutional structure , censorship will emerge a

Every social group eventually uses the weapon of censorship. It's not just government...even without a proper institutional structure , censorship will emerge as a thing that a social group does endogeneously. Like just scrolling back and looking at my last 10 posts on HN , I had to delete them after a few minutes in order to cut my losses because they were being heavily downvoted and once you are in negative territory nobody can see your posts anymore. People just crave and love being surrounded by people who see things the same way as they do, so after a person has been burned a bunch of times, they'd start stepping outside themselves and acting on what they think will sell well socially among the community. Pretty soon everybody starts doing this and you'll soon have a community full of people who are worthy of an actor studio interview. Hollywood, DC, San Francisco and the Valley are prime examples of this

inglor_cz 5y ago
Disapproval and shaming are very strong and potentially dangerous tools, but they are not the same as censorship, even though they overlap to some degree. (But what doesn't?) The worst kind of censorship is probably the emotionless, impersonal, mechanical sort done on a large scale either by specialized professionals or by robots.
akomtu 5y ago
It's because those who agree rarely bother to upvote, while those who disagree downvote often. It's the same in real world: disagreement in form of protests is loud and visible, while even massive support is quiet. One fix HN could make is to take into account the number of readers before hiding a comment: 4 downvotes is big when there are only 10 readers, but it's nothing when there's a million.
- maverick-iceman 5y ago
  That's the best idea I read on how to solve this problem, which sadly means it won't be implemented.... :P For the record I did upvote you!
- FpUser 5y ago
  In my opinion this voting system on public sites is bad idea. Simply showing number of upvotes / downvotes is sort of ok. Making downvoted posts loose visibility is the most fucked up implementation I think. It makes for heavy self censoring which in theory should be against the very idea of HN. Personally I sometimes upvote posts and had never downvoted a single one disregarding how much I do not like it. I know this one will be downvoted as well but I have better things to enjoy in life vs winning a pop contest on social media.

inglor_cz 5y ago

Disapproval and shaming are very strong and potentially dangerous tools, but they are not the same as censorship, even though they overlap to some degree. (But what doesn't?) The worst kind of censorship is probably the emotionless, impersonal, mechanical sort done on a large scale either by specialized professionals or by robots.

akomtu 5y ago

It's because those who agree rarely bother to upvote, while those who disagree downvote often. It's the same in real world: disagreement in form of protests is loud and visible, while even massive support is quiet. One fix HN could make is to take into account the number of readers before hiding a comment: 4 downvotes is big when there are only 10 readers, but it's nothing when there's a million.

maverick-iceman 5y ago
That's the best idea I read on how to solve this problem, which sadly means it won't be implemented.... :P For the record I did upvote you!
FpUser 5y ago
In my opinion this voting system on public sites is bad idea. Simply showing number of upvotes / downvotes is sort of ok. Making downvoted posts loose visibility is the most fucked up implementation I think. It makes for heavy self censoring which in theory should be against the very idea of HN. Personally I sometimes upvote posts and had never downvoted a single one disregarding how much I do not like it. I know this one will be downvoted as well but I have better things to enjoy in life vs winning a pop contest on social media.