I think it's time to move the discussion from how reddit's different to how news.yc is going to prevent the same thing from happening here. It's clear (at least to me) that comment voting just promotes group-think.

It seems we have a few stop-gap solutions (i.e. moderation) but nothing yet that's practical, elegant, and effective.

It's fun, it gets you lots of upvotes because maybe it makes someone smile. But it's too damn easy. It short-circuits real discussion with pop culture references and snarkiness. Conversation is quickly suffocated when solid posts are blanketed with 4chan memes as responses.

It comes down again to the quality of the comment. Is it a good humorous comment (e.g., not cliched, satiric, perhaps humorous and insightful, and so on), or is it a bad humorous comment (e.g., stale, not actually funny)? Right back where we started.

As Homer Simpson says, "When will people learn? Democracy just doesn't work."

That, in turn, is due to people caring more about rhetoric than reason. Regardless of whether something makes sense, if people can say it in a way that conveys the right image, they are "right."

And this is all because we spend way too much time passively consuming media, and are consequently taught to process things via image vs content.

I see so few comments here that deserve significant down voting, but the ones I come across that do have already been trashed to oblivion. Hell, I've had quite a few of mine own comments absolutely crucified and I feel no need to argue most of them. Comments aren't what I'm worried about, it's submissions.

Anyway, on the topic at hand: I agree that Zed did the morally right thing in the situation. Was it what I would have done? Probably not, but only because I don't much care for solving mysteries given almost no evidence or reason to believe something is actually wrong. As for reddit and "social news" sites in general, I stopped actually reading the comments long ago. I liken it to reading comments on Youtube; there is absolutely no redeeming value in it. HN, on the contrary, tends to have more value in the comments than the actual article some of the time. It's very surprising and may be the only thing keeping my rampant cynicism about "intelligence on the Internet" in check, as far as discussions are concerned.

That said, I'd be aghast if we ever descended to the level of reddit.

If you gather a bunch of crazies and give them voting buttons, the result will still be crazy. If you take away voting buttons from sensible people, the discussion will still be sensible.

The problem isn't that the voting promotes group-think. It's the entire premise of voting that is skewed. Once every while you can find a comment here, downvoted to oblivion, simply for stating an unpopular opinion. Before the issue of group-think comes into mind, you'd have to wonder what the down-voters are thinking, and further, how the way they think influences the overall discussion here.

I agree. It's happened to me a few times. Unfortunately, you can't force people into voting based on the "quality" of an opinion over their moral, ethical, or personal regard for that opinion. All you can really do is hope there are more free-thinkers than drones.

But the second time I didn't bother (even though I basically made the same comment further up the page - on a slightly different slant/discussion) and it got upvoted.

It always comes down to the users and their whims in the end :P

This place is a lot better than most :D

Reddit still has stuff that's worth reading, but damn, you have to search now. It's a pain.

Hmm...what's the benefit of comment voting? What's the signal carried by a high vote on a comment? I guess the intention is "this is worth reading/this is interesting"?

I wonder how the crowd would react to having agree/disagree/interesting/uninteresting buttons? Would that pull some of the 'noise' out into the agree/disagree axis, leaving better signal in the interesting/uninteresting?

If nothing else, it would give the software some traction on finding people who vote disagree+interesting which might help weighting/filtering.

There doesn't appear to be a way, or at least no large community seems to have ever found it on the scale of multiple years.

(I don't mean to advocate that one give up when I say that. What I'd really like to see is some real thought put into it. My real point is all the obvious solutions have been tried, and tried, and tried, and..... if anything's going to work it's not going to be the obvious.)

Better a few false positives than a false negative.

You've reminded me of something I've been thinking about lately and feel like writing down.

If you try to eliminate something from your personality in a straightforward way, what tends to happen is that it goes underground. You haven't gotten rid of X; you've fragmented your consciousness so that you're no longer aware of X, which makes you think X is gone when really it's continuing to operate. And X can work a lot more mischief now that it's autonomous from the part of you that wants to regulate it.

A straightforward example is the religious fanatic who suppresses his "demonic" impulses. We all know what such people tend to really be like.

Perhaps a more meaningful example for this forum is the kind of person who wants to overcome his fear by motivating himself to think he's not afraid and by executing certain actions to prove it. The trouble with doing this naively is that you can end up not with an absence of fear, but with unconscious fear, which continues to prevent you from doing things, only in ways you can't explain.

Of course, literature is replete with examples of this dynamic. The bottom line is that you can't minimize X in yourself by trying to eliminate it. It seems that a better strategy is to stay aware of X as it is happening. That way X and the part of you that is against X remain in the same field and there is a possibility of integration.

So, counterintuitively, if you really want to minimize something in yourself you have to accept it.

This sounds neat, but is it true? Executing actions really does drive away fear, moreover it seems to be the only effective way to overcome fear. If you tried it, you know. :-) Quitting smoking or stopping manipulative behavior cold turkey really does work, while the gradual approach doesn't work and is self-deceptive. I have decisively and successfully driven away certain qualities, and other people agree when asked that I no longer have them.

This kind of behavior, being conscious of and proud of one's own mediocrity, is something that has baffled me time and time again. Can someone please explain the thought process that leads to this? "People usually expect a certain level of decency and self-respect and I'm a unique, cool rebel so I'll do the opposite"?

Do you think your comment is more typical of HN or of reddit?