Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech (2019)

This illustrates a common misconception about HN's propensity to vote one way or another. Your reply came less than two hours later, whereas the voting isn't complete for a while longer and so the score still has plenty of time to change as the audience continues to process it. This phenomenon (and related handwringing about "is HN reddit now?") can be observed as far back as 2009, and likely even further[1].

You might notice that the comment you replied to (which I would argue is actually demonstrably factually wrong in a few ways, and yet) recovered from its time in the depths beyond. This is likely owing to the fact that it was at least tactfully written, so replies could be written without having to work around the expletive content of the original comment; yours did not, arguably because it was not.

Anyway, this all sort of sidesteps the fact that comment karma was never intended to represent the value of a post or how worthy it is for distribution. It's more like a temperature gauge allowing you to perceive honestly how your comment makes others feel. And disagreement is a feeling too. In the words of 'pg, downvotes have always been used for disagreement.[2]

My first reply to you originally earned one downvote. And I figured it would, from at least one person, but I said it anyway because I believed it should be said. And you have that same ability too. Don't let the numbers get to your head. Just try and have normal conversations with people and the points take care of themselves. (As an example of this, I broke even on my original reply after some time, and gained more in my second reply.) It's rare that people with the ability to read a room and at least attempt to be agreeable in some way end up censured.

Thanks for coming back to this thread! I feel like this became a little more substantive than it was when it began.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=721455

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392347

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It looks like there are two ways this can happen: 1) transformation and 2) migration.

1. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish: keep adding proprietary bits on top of the protocol until everyone's using what is essentially a proprietary platform.

2. A full migration. This is what happened to IM platforms that were once built atop Jabber/XMPP, like Google Talk.

I think the best way to keep this from happening is to make the open protocol robust enough to cover others' needs, and to get a large user base using different compliant client/server implementations to connect with each other. This is what's keeping Google's grip on email from growing more than it already has, and what prevented Microsoft from doing an EEE on the Web through Internet Explorer.

When diversity drops, an open platform can grow closed and allow domestication. Independent email providers must reckon with Google's spam filters, and non-Chromium browsers (Gecko-based, and to a lesser extend, Webkit-based browsers) are often treated as second-class citizens.

I might expand this into a follow-up article. While this article was an attempt at raising awareness and getting people to change their decision-making process when choosing platforms, my next article could be a call to action in which I encourage technical users to try clients/servers outside the mainstream and recommend good ones to their friends/families.

Thanks for your feedback, and for possibly inspiring my next post.