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This situation is very different from the Streisand effect. In the Streisand effect a single party is trying silence everyone else. Here everyone is trying to s

by Buge 12y ago

This situation is very different from the Streisand effect. In the Streisand effect a single party is trying silence everyone else. Here everyone is trying to silence you. They are nearly opposite situations. A minority trying to silence a majority vs a majority trying to silence a minority. In both situations the majority wins.

walterbell 12y ago
That is true if all downvoters are independent. Keep in mind that HN has cultural norms for downvoting, it is explicitly not for "silencing" opinions.
- DanBC 12y ago
  > HN has cultural norms for downvoting Those cultural norms are not written into any of the faqs or guidelines and they only exist within a subset of the users of the site. I don't know why you were downvoted so heavily! I would have thought that a few downvotes would have been enough.
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
    "Those cultural norms are not written into any of the faqs or guidelines " Cultural norms usually aren't, that's why they're culture.
    - DanBC 12y ago
      But those cultural norms are also only strong in a small subset of users. Plenty of people vote to agree or disagree, and this was acknowledged by pg. "Don't down-vote to disagree" is something brought over from Reddit and there is some strong resistance to it in some long term users (here longer than six years).
  - zevyoura 12y ago
    Complaining about downvotes is one of the easiest ways to accumulate them.
lifeisstillgood 12y ago
Downvoting is (afaik) for not meeting the norms of polite / intelligent discourse as opposed to "we disagree with your opinion". There are opinions which if expressed breach out taboos - the usual range if racism sexism etc - but this is certainly not the case here. So no, I think downvotes for a comment that is polite, intelligent, on topic and part of a discussion was the wrong use of downvotes. I still don't agree with it of course :-) User choice is a bugger on cloud services especially where they are shelling out to run the pygments lexer. On top of which is probably the interesting issue that there is no longer a binary on/off for most features. AB testing, feature toggles, stayed rollouts all mean we never quite know which version of a service we are running.

by Buge 12y ago

walterbell 12y ago

That is true if all downvoters are independent. Keep in mind that HN has cultural norms for downvoting, it is explicitly not for "silencing" opinions.

DanBC 12y ago
> HN has cultural norms for downvoting Those cultural norms are not written into any of the faqs or guidelines and they only exist within a subset of the users of the site. I don't know why you were downvoted so heavily! I would have thought that a few downvotes would have been enough.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
  "Those cultural norms are not written into any of the faqs or guidelines " Cultural norms usually aren't, that's why they're culture.
  - DanBC 12y ago
    But those cultural norms are also only strong in a small subset of users. Plenty of people vote to agree or disagree, and this was acknowledged by pg. "Don't down-vote to disagree" is something brought over from Reddit and there is some strong resistance to it in some long term users (here longer than six years).
- zevyoura 12y ago
  Complaining about downvotes is one of the easiest ways to accumulate them.

lifeisstillgood 12y ago

Downvoting is (afaik) for not meeting the norms of polite / intelligent discourse as opposed to "we disagree with your opinion". There are opinions which if expressed breach out taboos - the usual range if racism sexism etc - but this is certainly not the case here. So no, I think downvotes for a comment that is polite, intelligent, on topic and part of a discussion was the wrong use of downvotes. I still don't agree with it of course :-) User choice is a bugger on cloud services especially where they are shelling out to run the pygments lexer. On top of which is probably the interesting issue that there is no longer a binary on/off for most features. AB testing, feature toggles, stayed rollouts all mean we never quite know which version of a service we are running.