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.
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.
As for Eternal September, people have been saying these things for almost as long as HN has existed. If you want a plus-ça-change moment, take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1646871 from eight years ago (edit: or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926604, from nine).