“It's Not Cancel Culture – It's a Platform Failure.”

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Apr 14, 2021, 5:42 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #110

heterodoxxed wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe HN should get in the 20th century and allow users to delete their comments.

There are tradeoffs here. Of course we allow users to delete their comments, but once a comment has replies, deleting it deprives the replies of their context, which is not fair to the users who replied. We're trying to be fair to everybody, as well as to the community as a whole. If you delete-edit, you're doing an end run around that, which is not cool, and doing it on a whole bunch of posts is, as I said, vandalis…

Post by themacguffinman » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 3:18 AM UTC

WalterGR wrote: post #91

xwdv wrote: post #50

Some form of this is happening to me on hackernews as we speak. A long time ago, I had a lot of karma, almost a thousand. I was a model citizen for HN. But at some point, I must have posted a controversial opinion, and then HN decided they wanted to cancel me. If it wasn’t for a downvote limit per post, my karma would be below zero by now. Instead it has dwindled and deteriorated slowly over time, trending toward not…

"HN decided they wanted to cancel me." I've never heard of you. What does it mean that "HN decided"? Looking at your comments over the past 14 days, every one that's grey can be explained by enough people legitimately disagreeing with you to make them grey.

Post by themacguffinman » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 1:51 AM UTC

WalterGR wrote: post #114

themacguffinman wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK "legitimately disagreeing with you" is not supposed to be a reason to downvote. In practice this clearly happens often anyway, especially in political topics where it's likely harder to distinguish between wrong/misleading/hostile and regular political disagreement.

This comes up a lot. Paul Graham commented that downvoting for disagreement is fine. People sometimes link to the comment but I don’t have it bookmarked. Hopefully it has some nuance, like downvoting someone because their favorite movie isn’t your favorite movie is rude.