I get it, but this position makes HN definitively anti-free speech. You restrict speech and you restrict how people think. Calibrating speech is not free speech and neither is fading speech.

> the community signals that it has found something wrong with a comment.

A bully fat shaming would be "the community signaling that there is something wrong". The HN equivalent would be PC shaming.

What someone thinks of something has no bearing on right or wrong. Also "the community" isn't downvoting. It's always an individual.

A sincere course correcting response is the simple and natural fix, and what already happens. Downvoting helps with reducing responses, but comments are people. People do not enjoy being reduced.

> extremely important for calibrating users' perceptions of the community

I have enough experience now that I can write in HN mode. I cannot however, think in HN mode. I try, but whenever I think, comments like this one happens. This comment also violates the "ideology battle" clause from the HN guidelines because I am not allowed to fight for free speech. But stories about politics and ideologies make the top page all the time, and aren't most good disagreements ideological? Tabs versus spaces, React versus Vue, Open versus Closed source. Downvoting.

The technical part is never that deep. The deepest it can get is deeply technical.

With all that said, everything else about HN is the best on the internet hands down.

> I get it, but this position makes HN definitively anti-free speech

This is absolutely necessary to have a community. The moderation, both centralised in dang and distributed among the downvoters, is what makes HN HN and not a chan board. Removing comments deemed "bad" and thereby discouraging people from posting them in the first place adds value to the site.

It is far from perfect, but it's better than nothing.

> People do not enjoy being reduced.

No, but people don't enjoy being insulted either, and nor do they enjoy the "oh not this again" feeling that makes them reach for the downvote button in the first place.

(Disclaimer: I'm #24 in HN karma and #32 on electronics.stackexchange, so undoubtedly count as deeply embedded with the ""establishment"" downvoting all the edgy rebels)

> This is absolutely necessary to have a community.

Do you want a community/bubble or be open to other's idea ?

I downvote comments which I think make bad arguments. They either posit something without justifying it, or simply re-state what they said in their last comment.

This is not a judgement of the commenter's self-worth—merely of what I think other users ought to see. This way, the most interesting comments rise to the top, the least interesting comments fade away, and HN becomes a more interesting place with a higher signal-to-noise ratio.

In the case of your comment, I personally felt it was just a rehash of your prior comment (which does not appear to have a negative score as of this writing), without adding anything new. The comment reads "it's not downvote or nothing," but doesn't offer a plausible alternative for maintaining HN's high level of discourse.

Because the comment didn't contain anything new (as far as I could tell), I couldn't respond without perpetuating a circuitous thread. My response would likely have been downvoted as well, and rightly so.

I also downvoted your followup "why was I downvoted" comment, because the guidelines say not to discuss comment scores. I like this guideline, because arguing about comment votes is boring and uninteresting. Furthermore, if I answered your question, I'd be breaking the guideline myself. I'm now doing it anyway because you asked multiple times. :)

It's very possible that the other downvoters and I all misunderstood your comment. Then again, if we all misunderstood, it's likely other readers will too, and I'm thinking of their reading experience.

Anyway, I hope you'll stick around and I definitely hope you did not die!

In business, the survival motive becomes the profit motive. For content creators, the profit motive then manifests online as attention grabbing content. However, virality and truth are highly specific properties that rarely overlap. Clickbait is the author stretching virality to somewhat overlap with their message which hopefully holds some truth, but the entire piece can also just be an attention grabber.

If you work at a news source that values truth, sadly you're still not immune to the profit motive, so long as the content at any level is still required to make money. Hypocrisy arises when they begin to deny this.

But without the profit motive, outlets can easily become ideology driven. As hard as NPR may try not to be this, to some their bend is obvious. And then their is ideology as part of the profit motive. Like Fox.

What I would love to see is a platform that simply collects and sorts the events of the world as they unfold. Covid sites are one example. No agenda, no authors. Just the information that accurately describes the world as it unfold, or at least in theory. Another example would a police log published live at every department aggregated at the national level. No decisions would be involved in the publishing except that the post is accurate. The rest is each officer simply doing their job, and hopefully a great job. But the leap is in considering this a more valuable form of news. From attention grabbing to accurately exposing the state of affairs for easy consumption.

The problem with this of course is politics. When the events are what these representatives say, and what they say is dishonest, then even the honest news is the state of the dishonest affairs.

Police logs only seem easy to consume because they don't contain context. Context is prone to bias or intentional distortion, but it's still necessary for non-experts.

Does a recent spike in bar fights mean your town is in hard economic times, or was there a giant music festival nearby that attracted thousands of people? That influences whether I should worry the next time I go to the bar; if it's the economy, this will keep happening, but if it's the festival, we'll be fine once they leave. That context also helps me decide how to act on the information. Do I petition for downtown revitalization or for neighboring towns' police to help with events?

It's on the audience to demand good evidence to back up the context (e.g., did the guys in the fight recently lose their jobs or just came from the festival). That's hard, but I have yet to see another good way.

Clarity and brevity are good, but when everyone is focused, no one is talking. Silence is the sound of everyone working. Talking can be a symptom of mismanagement.

Also, better English won't help when the goal is to dodge work or responsibility, which is often what's behind miscommunicating team members. A well spoken excuse is still a poor excuse.

Ya, it should just read "slippery when wet". Maybe add an exclamation mark to show urgency and that you care.

So how we would describe the sign is usually what it should say. Like, "STOP".

Or in this case "Caution" which usually is the largest text on these type of signs. Caution and some indication they are referring to the floor, which could just be contextual. The queue that these signs are often short will natural indicate the eye to look at the floor, so that is nice when it works out.

One-ness is a physical property and that's why we can see it. The magic happens when we call them all one, give it a symbol, and make them all equal. Now "one" has a unique existence of its own on a piece of paper on a mathematicians desk, scribbled alongside other unique symbols, whose relationships come complete with proofs. And the only question then is whether what was scribbled says something true, as in, something that aligns with the reality it came from, because that would make it useful.

Math is a map. Maps are only real insofar as being a map, and only useful insofar as being true.

The drawing of the streets may be drawn with your pencil from memory, but the truth your friend relies on to get them where they need to go is real. The paper and pencil are real. And the physics of the informative truth that transcends from the streets to the paper is also real. Computers are the machines we've built based on the physics of logic, abstraction, and meaning. A computational value is something that means something to something else.

> One-ness is a physical property and that's why we can see it.

We can see it, but does that make it a physical property or something that we impose upon the universe?

For the rest of your statement, I don’t know if we can easily define “true” or “useful”. Epistemology has been working on those concepts for a long, long time, and I don’t know if they’ve made much progress recently.

One-ness is a shape of a thing, much like triangle-ness or circle-ness. Shapes are physical, but they can be copied, unlike the things themselves. And when meaning is associated with a shape, that meaning can then be copied and read. So we can take "one-ness" which is physically measurable and identifiable, associate a new shape such as "1", and now we have a shape with meaning detached from its origin that we can copy, read, and communicate. The source is still reality, and this physical mechanism is what makes communication possible. Gather enough of these symbols and you have a language. Combine these symbols and you have a statement. Have anything that reads and reacts to statements and you have consequences. From DNA to protein, from grocery list to grocery bag, from tweet to insurrection.

Any combination of words can form a statement. So someone comes along and says let's agree on grammar. Then someone comes along and says let's confirm with nature whether statements actually align with nature before we call it a fact. This is modern science and the scientific truth. Scientifically, nature is the single source of truth and is all true. False only exists in the gap between a statement and nature.

I think facts, truth, unity, etc, are fundamental building blocks of our perception of reality, not reality itself. That doesn’t make truths or facts invalid. We all share some common perception of the universe, at a very low, fundamental level. I believe knowledge can be built on that foundation.

Not only do we share some common perception, we're also all real. We are part of the universe. So to say people are subjective or that imagination is imaginary or that reality is an illusion for the purpose of dismissing them from reality is all wrong. You need a model that is more inclusive that describes it all with physics as the premise. For example, a dream requires a sleeping biological brain full of memories drawn from physical experiences.

Truth isn't reality itself in the physical sense. But the word "apple" isn't an actual apple either in the physical sense. Yet, for the purposes of language, it is. And that is the exact extent to which truth is reality in language. When we claim truth, we claim to be making a statement of reality. If that statement includes God, then your reality includes God. If it includes only physical evidence, then your reality is based on physical evidence. We can align our realities scientifically by aligning them with science. But again, based on your life, your work, and your beliefs, your reality will deviate. That's just part of what makes us all unique.

But as you say, our unique realities are still valuable and real. Though error prone as they may be, they are real reality drawn from a real life. It's not separate just because they contradict. That's why our ability to communicate our truths is cital, and Free Speech is sacrosanct.

(con't) An abstraction is the smallest unit of reason, and logic creates the desired cause and effect as each truth flows through the system.

You're still translating the mouse image into "mouse" in your mother tongue, then staring at the Japanese word.

But I do agree translation does about as much harm as good. It's a shortcut that helps you shorten the learning curve by importing what you already know about language and the things you often say generically from another language. Learning a language is really really hard, so for many, without this shortcut, you'd barely get anywhere. That's the only good it does though, because it will set you back from becoming fluent and will continue to prevent you from thinking in that new langauge.

The best way to learn a language is through mimicry, immersion, and repetition as you're surrouned by people who only speak that language, who are also friendly, forgiving, and willing to talk to you. Like, children surrounded by their parents, then friends, then friends and teachers.

> The best way to learn a language is through mimicry, immersion, and repetition as you're surrouned by people who only speak that language, who are also friendly, forgiving, and willing to talk to you. Like, children surrounded by their parents, then friends, then friends and teachers.

Those people must also be willing to correct you when you make a mistake, which is socially much harder as an adult.

I would go far as to say it's obfuscation. But I don't think the CSS people feel the same. At this point I've chalked it up to a difference in philosophy and ideology.

Brevity, explicitness, obviousness, conciseness, and symmetry all contribute to the simplicity and order of a language, which minimizes the learning curve and maximizes ease of utility.

If that were the goal, there are tons of things that could and would have been done differently.

Most lists such as that of the OP and most criticism of CSS I find to be about users from a user standpoint criticising something about CSS that is either obfuscating or obstructive to their experience and productivity.

edit for the record:

> You'll offend them...

If you encounter someone oversensitive, millineal or otherwise, you'll offend them...

That is impossible to police. The topic is Freedom of Speech. You need to ban these topics or there will always be battles, as there should be.

Greatgirl also makes an important point. It also appears she only made this point once, here, and has no other "violations". The comment wasn't provoking or ill-meaning. It most certainly did not "trample curiosity".