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aspensmonster | 12 years ago
>The majority of HN users are thoughtful and nice. It's clear from the data that they reliably downvote jerks and trolls (and specifically, they don’t silence minority groups—we’ve looked into this). What dang and kogir found was a way to turn the volume up on this kind of downvote.
I suppose that explains why the effects of downvotes on my past comments are persisting for weeks, regardless of the content of comments that come after. Heck, it explains everything about my experience on HN for the past three weeks or so. Story time!
I was recently met with a torrent of downvotes --nearly 100, might have actually crossed that-- for poking fun at HN's incessant we're-not-reddit-we're-much-more-sophisticated circlejerking (the irony is not lost). I'm specifically referring to this submission:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7491170
It was an announcement that Valve was open-sourcing its fork of Mesa. Someone made a HL3 confirmed chain: Mesa -> Black Mesa -> Half-Life -> Half-Life 3 CONFIRMED etc etc. That it was a story about Valve only helped, and so I cheerfully advised this commenter not to distract Gaben from Left 4 Dead 3. I was downvoted and I proceeded to taunt the hivemind. Indeed I felt quite gleeful that I managed to hit the floor of "-4" for each of the comments whilst my total karma counter continued to decrement. There were even others that saw fit to traverse my past comments and downvote those too. I'm sure those comments deserved it; they must have been off-topic or non-substantive or out-of-scope.
Of course, the Rules of HN are such that you can't complain about downvoting. You cannot incite people to downvote you either. So yes, "shame on me" for not engaging in the proper circlejerking motions. Shame on me for continually pointing out this community's obsession over being the "glorious master race" of online discussion whilst poo-pooing the cesspools of "filthy casuals" like Reddit or, god forbid, Slashdot. "Shame on me" for partaking in the memes of any culture other than HN's. I should know better. Those are "low/no-content" things. They are "not substantive." Or my personal favorite: they are "outside the scope of HN." There's always some excuse that the hivemind will come to a consensus on.
The net effect is thus:
* I now get to wait several seconds for a page load, as if I were shadow banned. Who knows. Maybe I am :D Viewing the website without a logged-in session produces immediate page loads.
* Any comment I submit, regardless of length, is lucky to make it more than a third of the way up from the bottom of the page to *start*. It seems my comments don't get to percolate from the top down any more.
* My comments that do get upvotes never seem to rise past this point on the page.
I find it hard to believe that the Gods of HN are merely "silencing" the "jerks and trolls" whilst leaving the pure and unadulterated essence of HN to flourish. Perhaps this is all just a consequence of a single, massive downvote spike that torched my 5.0+ rating down to 1.14 (do I see 0.* yet?). I don't believe that. Between "pending" comments and the "downvote threshold" and the "flagging threshold" and the "we'll revoke your privileges if we please" attitude, I'd say things are exactly the way they want them to be.
At this point, I really don't think I'm interested in continuing to be a part of HN. I don't want to continue to be a data point in some Big Data Miner's grand experiment to see just how organically he can manufacture consent. And I'm sure the hivemind will have no problem with that state of affairs. I'm just a perfect example of the system working as intended. It's not a bug. It's a feature. I'm the problem they're trying to solve. Etc etc etc...
HN isn't trying to stave off an Eternal September. It's doing everything it can to never reach October.
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