You can enable showdead in your settings, and even low contrast messages can be spoken aloud by your friendly neighborhood TTS or pasted somewhere friendly for your reading displeasure.
Not to say that ample downvotes don’t show some particular biases of the HN crowd, but it’s not like those comments disappear and you can make your own mind if they are low quality drivel or inconvenient dissent.
Well, if they did disappear completely, you'd have no way to retrieve their contents. They are extremely faded, true, but I've spent many of my childhood years watching cartoons on an old B&W television set with an extremely faded CRT, so I may be a bit desensitized.
I'm not overflowing with boundless adoration for the HN forums (I've heard someone calling them "like Reddit, but made of galaxy brains" and it made me laugh out loud) and feel that the overall crowd here does display certain biases and flaws (myself included, of course), and that it has a set of wrongthink taboos for which you can be downvoted into oblivion, but at least there is a setting which will show you the downvoted, flagged, and dead comments at all so you can see for yourself and make your own judgement if it was fair.
Unsurprisingly, most of the flagged/dead content is a sort of toilet humor, or some memespeak interjections devoid of content at all. Some messages are interesting, but they are few and far between. (I enjoy reading dead/flagged stuff nevertheless.)
There exist forums which moderate messages in a way that the inconvenient/wrongthink/irrelevant/taboo/spam content disappears along with all the replies, as if it never appeared there. I doubt you'd want it quite like that.
Downvoting is a form of free speech too. You have the freedom to say what you like, but there’s no obligation on anyone else to listen to it or like it, or publish and distribute it.
You're conflating downvoting with flagging. Enough flagging + default reader settings on HN = distributed ability to censor HN stories/comments. Of course this is all by design - the moderators have been clear that they're not optimizing for freedom of speech, but rather interesting discussions.
And that's their right. Freedom of speech is not a requirement for a platform, it mainly means you won't be arrested and punished for things you say. And if you do, that's where the ACLU steps in.
However, in any community where the down vote is used for mere disagreement, there is no room for dissenting opinions. An open discourse requires that people are willing to listen to those whom they disagree with. Down voting liberally is counter to that principle.
I disagree. Downvoting for disagreement is a way of saving time in the discussion from reading lower value comments. To much low value content can mask more thoughtful discussion.
Just because I don't agree with someone's perspective, doesn't inherently make it low value or not thoughtful. I find I often learn much from people I disagree with, even if their argument didn't change my mind.
No the disagreement doesn’t make it inherently make it low value, and I personally don’t downvote purely for disagreement, but for disagreement with argument methods wether I agree with the positions or not.
People forget that Hacker News is explicitly not a forum for free speech or open discourse. It's a forum for curated speech, sometimes aggressively curated, preferring fewer comments of higher quality over more comments of lower quality, even at the cost of open discourse.
It gets on my nerves too but that's Chinatown, as it were.
I don’t see how the message is anti-white. The claim seems to be that “free speech” has become something of a dog whistle. It’s certainly true where I am, and as a supporter of free speech I dislike the association!
If 'free speech' is a 'dog whistle' what would be a viable alternative to get the same ideal, without falling afoul of a shift in the 'dog whistle' goalpost?
It’s not as simple as that. You need to look at when someone comes out in support of free speech. Do they only use it as way to defend people who they support (for other reasons) and never in support of people they disagree with?
