Agreed! Downvoting ruins everything. Not sure what HN gains from it other than leaving a bitter taste in the mouth after somebody dares to post unpopular opinions!
If you completely ignore the votes life on HN is much better. Remember that most people live in a cargo cult reality and don't even know it or care to recognize it. It is far easier for a person to align with their surroundings than to stick their head out and suggest thoughts or ideas that migh separate them from the surrounding culture and ideology.
History is full of examples of people who see the world differently only to be ridiculed (or worst) and later proven to be correct. From Copernicus to Columbus, the Personal Computer and FedEx. Ideas that were ridiculed and rejected by "smart folks" only to alter society in a major way once proven to be correct.
This, I feel, is what isn't captured by these silly voting systems. The HN version of fora would have burned Copernicus at the stake for daring to suggest that the Earth was not the center of the universe. Similarly, here, today, the voting system does not capture innovative thinking but rather cargo cult. Yes, it generally helps bubble good/correct posts to the surface but it also serves to squash down anything that does not align with majority rule. Which means that the audience is subjected to a positive feedback loop fed by cargo cult mentality rather than allowing the injection of a variety of viewpoints for intelligent independent evaluation.
Again, ignore the voting system. Don't let it get to you. It isn't designed to promote alternative thinking at all, that much is evident.
Someone needs to come up with a system that limits mob rule through voting and enhanced the ability of communities to maintain quality user-contributed content while giving equal time to alternative points of view.
This is not easy. These kinds of problems go back to the old USENET days. Of course, there was no click voting system. What would happen is that you'd get piled-on by folks who felt entitled to police specific lists. Horrible nasty flame wars would emerge with people being brutally assaulted online in every way imaginable.
Today things are different, the up/down vote is there. And every site I can think of has mob rule problems. From StackOverflow to HN and everything in between.
Well something I'd ban is "awesome power" capabilities.
Some sites, after you get more than 30 billion upvotes (or some suitably hyperbolic number), you become a meta-poster with various super-powers and the ability to sling your weight around and punish the noobs. The all time favourite "closed for being primarily opinion-based" is wielded with totalitarian contempt and authority. Absurd really because EVERYTHING is opinion based; sometimes those opinions are backed up by empirical evidence sometimes they're backed up by having 30 billion upvotes.
The whole system stinks and, before a super-user blacks me for "Irrelevant or tangential content", the reason I address this is because the original poster who was screwed by Amazon is just another example of too much power being wielded to suppress dissent.
Further, before I'm accused of a diatribe about a problem without offering a solution, I have a number of proposals none of which will ever be implemented because the all-powerful and mighty may lose their pre-eminent positions as a result.
Well, one would have to be careful with this. A business has the responsibility and right to present the public persona they think best matches their goals or the image they wish to portray to the public. In that context, treating some user submitted content with a "totalitarian" approach is, well, justified.
As an example, there is no reason for Apple to tolerate racist remarks in their user fora. That sort of things has nothing to do with their company and the image they wish to portray. The right thing to do is to remove such posts and ban the users who post them right away.
How about a political discussion forum? Should they allow racist discussions? That's a stretch. Don't know. The stuff is nasty. However, one could argue it is better in the open than behind closed doors because it could serve to inform, educate and perhaps convince a few people to change their ideology for the better.
This is an extreme example, of course, yet this sort of thing is exactly why I said moderation systems are difficult to implement. I don't know of anyone who's done it "right" (in quotes because we don't really know what that means). There are mod systems that work reasonably well but not all the time. In HN's case some subjects bring out cargo-cult down-voting and alternative opinions are simply squashed down. That's just the way it is.
Keep in mind that these fora don't have to be about freedom of speech. They are private sites with their own ecosystems and rules. I you don't like it you can leave.
My approach on a site like HN is to envision mass down-voters as post-adolescent emotional cargo-cult voters who have been indoctrinated or peer-pressured into thinking in a certain way. They have little life experience as the basis of their opinions and seem to refuse to get past the indoctrination or cargo-cult mentality to actually analyze issues before forming an opinion. In other words, their opinions are given to them, they are not the result of life experience and analysis.
For example, there are plenty of people on HN who will post about business without ever having started or operated one. You can see them a mile away because of how ridiculous their comments are in the context of someone who has launched and operated one or more real businesses. These people will down-vote opinions of someone with experience because they probably sound harsh or foreign to them.
They, for example, don't understand the interaction between taxation and business decisions or government and business growth. And yet you can't fault them because they simply don't have the life experience. These are things that are nearly impossible to teach. You can read about it all you want in a book. Your brain does not "click" into reality mode until, for example, a government official shows up at your business asking you to pay the county a "privilege" tax on your desk, printer, computer, chairs, refrigerator and machinery (this is a real thing, BTW).
Once you transition into considering the source of down-votes none of it bothers you. Just state your position and ignore the down-votes. Life is good.
