To my fellow Hacker News contributors

Yeah, it's hard to say what - if anything - to do about this. Like you say, if you post a reply to a comment that you downvoted, you are - arguably - just adding more noise. But, then again, people always complain about "ninja downvoting" and say "if you're going to downvote me, at least tell me why."

But the last time I left a reply to something I downvoted, my reply in turn got downvoted pretty quickly (although it eventually go voted back up to a neutral score of 1), which left me questioning the wisdom of doing that. And the sad thing is, the comment in question was one of those that centered around one of those possible "group think" scenarios... so I don't know if I just got downvoted by members of the "other camp" or by (more or less) neutral observers who don't support leaving replies explaining why you find a comment troublesome.

Uuugggh.... there's no way to win. Maybe we need /. style moderation so you can tag a comment as "off topic" or whatever when you downvote...

As to the bigger question of eliminating the "tribalism," hhhmmm... I wish I had an answer, but sadly I can't say I do. Maybe your post will at least raise awareness of the issue and will help a bit?

Comment down/up votes have to go. People should be adult enough to be able read a post without someone telling them what's readworthy or not. Life is not a popularity contest where you tally how many points you've gotten for playing the game well.

Members should, however, be able to flag comments that violate the guidelines so that the mods can deal with spam and other transgressions.

>Like you say, if you post a reply to a comment that you downvoted, you are - arguably - just adding more noise. //

Personally I think HN has degraded vastly since we lost scores. I see far more downvotes for disagreement and apparently less interest in supporting good argument.

It's really hard now to read HN and get much from it unless the topic is one you want to read every single comment on.

I hope I'm not dragging things away from the OP main point but I feel this is not unrelated to it.

I agree with the sentiment but here's the thing...

The type of person to post an insult or an ad hominem is probably not the type of person who would read this post much less care what it has to say. Because for someone to read this they'd have to care about the impact they have on the community and there's no way an insult or ad hominem can have a positive impact on the community. They are, by definition, expressions of pure negativity so their intent is unquestionably negative.

(and don't even get me started on the people who upvote such posts)

So you can't just say "lets all get together and fix this" because the people who would answer your call aren't the people causing the problem. Then the question becomes "how do you deal with the people causing the problem".

The only answer I can see is banning. Because said group is made out of two types of people: Those who don't care about the community and those who care about the community but care about expressing their own anger more. So the first group just won't care and the second group can't help themselves.

But then the question is "Do you really want Hacker News to be a place where people get banned on a regular basis?". First I don't think pg even has the time for that and second I think most would find that off putting.

So (and pardon me for the long comment here) we end up where we started. Trying to be civil and interact with the civil members of the community while trying to ignore those who don't care about civility.

As communities grow they need to fragment. Without fragmenting, how a story does becomes sensitive to initial conditions and subject to information cascade (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_cascade). We still don't know how to manage this gracefully.