[pickingdinner]

These platforms are not designed for intellectual discourse, even when they're advertised to be, and even when they try to be.

You can't just be right. You also need to be careful. Some would say mindful, but that's not it. You need to be careful not to trigger anyone or trip any ideological wires. Not fun and for what, so you don't bother anymore.

And this is not to discredit the moderators or anything else here or on any other moderation dependent platform. Without them the average quality of comments would be worse, but there also is no denying that their primary role is censorship.

[acover]

> In Comments

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

The guidelines want you to be kind, which is orthogonal to right.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[Karrot_Kream]

The guidelines are there to remind you where the site's incentives and culture don't. IME all upvote oriented sites turn into forums for "winning debate club" rather than enlightening discussion. The big difference between the sites is who the judges (upvoting user base) are. The guidelines and moderation here retard the trend but a trend it is nonetheless.

[oceanplexian]

Being unkind actually means you're approaching a discussion with the intent of hurting another person, it's not a property of being factually correct or incorrect. Lots of assholes out there are "technically correct", and there are lots of people out there who are wrong, but still decent human beings.

However, you often can't retroactively determine someone's intent over the Internet. Therefore, you have to start somewhere. If you're a cynic, I guess you assume everyone is out to offend or hurt others. But as an optimist, I tend to assume good faith unless proven otherwise.

[thomasfromcdnjs]

I like reading Marginal Revolution because it doesn't have this rule whilst also being a rather intellectually curious place.

(not suggesting HN ever takes this route)

[yzydserd]

How is being kind orthogonal to being right?

[pickingdinner]

Downvoted without a counter argument. Which just proves my point. There is nothing more unintellectual than a plain downvote. I even had some guardrails in that comment too. But I am sure the downvote was warranted to the person who did it.

But also upvotes are similar. No one necessarily "likes" the truth. Nothing about correctness really warrants whatever an upvote means to that person. A "correct" vote maybe, but those are unavailable on these platforms. Not designed for intellectual discourse.

Just to be fair, Twitter is worse. How can you have intellectual discourse with character limits and contextless-ness as a feature? You get something, and something valuable to many, surely, but it isn't intellectual discourse.

Youtube comments are another great case study. Reddit also.

[rezonant]

I often find that checking comment karma too frequently can come with an emotional rollercoaster. You post a take you think folks will find interesting or resonate with, and then the next time you look at it it's gone from 1 to 0.

But it's important to remember that it's a balance that you can't see. If your comment has a 1, that could have been 10 downvotes and 10 upvotes in the time since you posted the comment. And if you wait awhile, more often than not it will go back up. I've had comments hit a -2 and then end up being a 5, or even more. It's all organic.

It's best not to overreact because you happened to look when the balance was a little more negative than positive, and it's useful to consider the possibility that there are 9 upvotes and 10 downvotes to make your comment sit at a zero.

I empathize with what you are saying in the parent post about being cautious not to create a firestorm of people who are offended by your post. But this is really only an issue early on when your karma is low, and that's when it feels the most negative. Sometimes I post things that folks don't like, getting a -1 or a -2 or even -3- but ultimately the impact of that comment to your karma is capped. I don't think it's possible to, say, get a -57 (your current karma) and zero out your account.

EDIT: Oh, according to HN Undocumented, it actually does reduce your user karma even if the comment itself can't go past -4 [https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented?tab=re...]. But it is important to remember that by that point the comment is dead and only users with showdead turned on can even see it anymore. And of course flamewar protection can disable the downvote button (at least the convenient one) when it is triggered, and as a story itself ages downvoting and even upvoting gets automatically turned off.

After you've been posting for a long time and your karma grows into the thousands, having a post be unpopular is basically a non-issue. Obviously you should still adhere to the guidelines and not get yourself removed due to misbehavior, but you just don't have to worry about it much.

Still, this community works best when we take HN's guidelines to heart. Everyone wants to be treated with kindness and the benefit of the doubt, and trying to build that into your own posts helps maintain that community.