People will flag a comment they don't like, hop on multiple accounts to spam downvotes, will downvote everything a person writes (via their comment history), all kinds of malicious behavior on HN if someone posts something they disagree with.
It doesn't take many of those people to ruin the experience for others, and dang doesn't lift a finger A) because he's of the opinion that disagreement amongst users is bad for HN and B) the software running HN is old and not sophisticated enough to detect bad actors.
I had to abandon my other account recently because I'd get hit with 10-15 downvotes in the span of 3-5 minutes, multiple times a day as I was using the site. Many hours of minimal activity and then boom, minus 15 karma, all at once, corresponding precisely with the number of comments I had that were votable (less than a day old).
Not sure how to describe a nuanced point of view though, it's a point of view that loses critical fidelity when generalized. If the generalization falls into the "dissent" bucket, it's then given the above treatment by bad actors on HN, which has the effect of only allowing a single specific viewpoint to exist on HN, because "flagged" messages aren't displayed at all, and downvoted comments are literally hard to read via fading.
I meant specific about the content of your dissent.
Dissenting opinions are basically just different from the majority. Anarchist opinions are like this, vegan opinions are like this. Fascist opinions are also like this. Just saying it’s dissent is not too informative.
