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Critiques and debates are fine, but downvotes don't encourage discussion, they scream "shut up" and disincentivize speaking about the issue ever again, and down
by dheera 5y ago
Critiques and debates are fine, but downvotes don't encourage discussion, they scream "shut up" and disincentivize speaking about the issue ever again, and downrank a viewpoint instead of leaving it up for fair discussion.
Because presumably, if it works like many other systems, if you get downvoted enough, you probably get banned, so it means I should be scared to say what I said again.
If people were interested in debating like mature adults without downvoting then I would have left it up and continued the discussion.
- IncRnd 5y agoOkay. Why did you make an engineering discussion into a discussion about race?
- User23 5y agoThe moderators here are exceedingly reasonable. Don’t worry about getting banned on account of downvotes unless you’re violating the guidelines. And the staff at hn@ycombinator.com is shockingly responsive for a site of this size. They really do want to encourage intellectual curiosity.