But what if that's the only thing keeping comments on HN any good? If you post something that isn't genuinely interesting or insightful the best case is that you get ignored and the worst case is that you get shadow banned. This means that everyone hovers over the submit button and second guesses whether what they're posting is any good. I know that I've probably aborted about 1/3rd of all my comments and I think that's a good thing.
>second guesses whether what they're posting is any good.
A much more accurate portrayal is everyone second guessing whether or not their comment will please the HN group-think. People don't filter themselves when they think their idea is stupid, they filter themselves when they think their idea will be unpopular.
Agreed - but the whole idea of upvotes is based on the idea that a popular comment = a good comment. The entire foundation of the system falls apart if you dispute that and the upvote system becomes the wrong choice.
I think in practice that 'popular comment = good comment' works well enough that it seems to beat all competing systems for internet commenting so there must be some kind of truth in the statement. Maybe it has a low enough false positive rate to make a small false negative rate acceptable?
But perhaps this is the problem of moderating comments on a binary scale of "good" and "bad".
A comment judgement/rating system that is more nuanced will not only help the readers to choose from but also help the commenting user to understand why his comments are being downvoted. Examples of nuanced downvote reasons may include:
I personally would be interested in seeing whether, over time, my comments (and therefore my thinking) have been victim to certain patterns of thinking that I haven't noticed in myself.
Racism/Sexism/Bigotry can end up in logical fallacy territory pretty easily. "If women were unsuited for tech careers, there would be few of them in tech; there are few women in tech, therefore women are unsuited for tech careers" is a logical fallacy that I see around here pretty often. "Sexism" is just easier to remember than "Affirming the consequent".
But calling the problem there "sexism" has two major negative effects: it can lead you to believe that correct sexist arguments are flawed by their sexism, and it can lead you to accept affirming-the-consequent type arguments that aren't sexist. If something's wrong, you don't want to slam it for orthogonal traits, you want to slam it for the things that make it wrong.
It's a good point. I've spent time responding to a comment and decided to abandon because the HN community will soon correct me if I'm being biased or saying things without any real source to back it up.
I don't worry so much about being up voted or down voted (but I dig getting karma points as I know I'm giving someone else some value). I do however care about end up in a disagreement with someone else that turns into a superiority match. I personally don't want to be that person.
