While I agree with this in practice, with the culture wars of the past few years, HN has recently received its fair share of people who downvote due to disagreement. It used to be that downvotes were generally reserved for poor quality comments and upvotes were given for substantive well-considered comments even when one disagreed. Eternal september and culture wars are a bad combination. It's no longer innocent ignorance in this eternal september.
I don't have a solution to offer here, but I increasingly sympathize with those that create throwaway accounts, especially now that intent is not longer considered when interpreting comments. People have been losing their jobs not for what they meant, but due to how their words were interpreted by someone else. The fact that HN doesn't allow one to delete their comments, makes these cultural changes increasingly concerning. Who knows which of our past comments will come back to bite us as society becomes less tolerant of ideas.
It's also inaccurate about deletion. We're happy to delete or redact older comments when users ask us to, and we do this all the time. We don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted to HN. What we don't allow is wholesale deletion.
I was talking mostly about users who create throwaway accounts for everything, including uncontroversial stuff, so I don't see the relevance of the culture wars here.
I have always wondered if its possible to have three buttons (A)gree, (D)isgaree and (U)nhealthy. The first two buttons control how high up a comment apears in the thread/page and the last does the graying out currently reserved for downvoting. If there was any forum where people could deal with three buttons, HN would be it. Any thoughts?
That's a really nasty policy. If you openly said at account creation "Privileged users are free to downvote your comments and gray them out if they disagree with them, and you will not get this privilege for months or years, because there's a high karma threshold which we don't reveal" -- I don't know why I would bother signing up. I assumed it would be a reasonably attainable privilege for defensible uses, like it is at Stack Overflow or Slashdot.
All it takes to get downvote privileges is to submit a few decent stories. Anyone serious about being a solid contributor to the community can get there within a couple of weeks or even days.
People will downvote for whatever reason they want; HN admins can't control that, and couldn't stop people downvoting for disagreement even if they wanted to (though the karma threshold helps to limit downvoters to people who value the health of the community at least to some degree).
The best comments are those that people needn't strongly agree or disagree with, but that cause one to learn something new or think about something in a way they hadn't previously.
If you try and phrase most comments like that (which is surprisingly achievable, even - or especially - on the more contentious topics), downvotes needn't be a problem for you.
I didn't share the site's unstated assumption that making comments that people upvote isn't being a "contributor to the community".
You can control downvoting for disagreement by explicitly stating a norm against it, as StackOverflow does with alt text over the downvote and Reddit does with Reddiquette.
I don't believe I had had a comment downvoted before this one expressing disagreement with downvoters. However, I have found that many downvoted comments do contribute to the discussion, and even earn my upvote about 25% of the time. I don't think the downvote inner circle has a wholly positive effect on the site.
Who knows which of our past comments will come back to bite us as society becomes less tolerant of ideas.
Your desired solution only deepens such problems. It agrees that one is guilty and deserving of being fired instead of pushing back against that idea.
Disney recently fired someone for decade old tweets. Shortly thereafter, some publication stood by its decision to hire someone when their old not PC tweets came to light.
Civil liberties can be lost at any point in time. Gaining them doesn't guarantee them in perpetuity. They need to be guarded and promoted.
Falling on your sword is a great sentiment. But not everyone has the luxury of pushing back and risking their livelyhood and the income that feeds, clothes, and shelters themselves and their family.
I don't have a solution to offer here, but I increasingly sympathize with those that create throwaway accounts, especially now that intent is not longer considered when interpreting comments. People have been losing their jobs not for what they meant, but due to how their words were interpreted by someone else. The fact that HN doesn't allow one to delete their comments, makes these cultural changes increasingly concerning. Who knows which of our past comments will come back to bite us as society becomes less tolerant of ideas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html