Ask HN: Who are the most controversial (yet still popular) HNers?

The fact that something like that can be achieved by a schizophrenic man who uses the "n-word" in sentences like one uses butter on toast is truly inspirational. TempleOS is an excellent example of so-called "outsider art", but is also a significant technical feat on its own.

The practice of editing [and deleting] of my comments seems to have made my writing better. Writing for myself is easier than writing for an audience. And writing for an audience that expects me to give a shit is harder than writing for the audience that admires people for pretending to not give a shit. And no doubt, this thread illustrates -- as if the rest of the internet did not already provide overwhelming evidence -- that there is a large audience for writing that pretends not to give a shit.

Flame warriors and trolls are the original internet crowd. Not giving a shit is not a unique point of view. It's the default content of all the little internet boxes into which people can type. It's good that downvotes hurt because the solution is writing something better.

Good luck.

In my opinion they need to be replaced with something more decentralized that puts each individual user in control of what kind of comments they want to see and makes them each decide individually.

Imagine if people who everybody disagreed with always got censored? We'd have all sorts of situations where everybody would suffer until things like basic hygiene for physicians were discovered. Oh wait, that already happened and you can read about it here - http://www.medicaldaily.com/mad-scientist-6-scientists-who-w...

Online systems are so much more fluid than real-life and we have a good opportunity to change the way things are done, but unfortunately the biggest sites for conversation all follow the same brain-dead upvote/downvote system. I hope that one day we'll have a better system which at least lets individuals choose their own moderator or moderation style.

I meant like they can downvote me, and I can't downvote them, or anyone, at any time, because I don't have that whatever the requirement is ( mod level, karma level ) yet...so it's like this asymmetry that doesn't exist in the real world.

I don't feel any restriction talking to any human in real life. Nothing they can do to me I can't do back to them. So it's balanced. I'm safe. We're equal. I understand other people may feel differently, this is how I feel.

But on HN, I can't downvote. So there's this asymmetry. To me, it's a perversion. Because in the real world, only the State has a monopoly on legal violence. Only the state can use violence, legally. But on HN, downvotes don't only come from mods or police, they come from whoever has accrued sufficient karma -- and I don't equate this with a sort of objective, regulated, principle-based State level power.

So the state has a (correct, IMO) asymmetric monopoly on legal violence and can dish it out to people as it sees fit, but people cannot do the same, without either expecting to get the same in self-defense, or getting consequences from the state. But on HN, any random Jo with enough karma has the analogous asymmetry power.

That's what I meant. It's not necessarily about retaliating, it's about having that option on the table, rather than some people having it and others not having it.

Or no one having it except the State ( the mods, I guess ).