

Ask YC: You are promoting me too mentality and not intellectual debate. - whalliburton

The current voting scheme promotes herd mentality and not a diversity of thought. I do not have a solution, just this observation.
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jrockway
It is all about who participates in the voting. On Reddit (and Digg, I guess),
the voting is done by retarded 9-year-old fanbois, and as a result, rewards
ideas and comments that appeal to that demographic. Highly rated comments
there are often some of the worst material I've ever read in my life. It often
makes me pray for my own death. Correspondingly, some good ideas and arguments
are often downmodded to -10, even though they are fine comments.

Over here, it's not as bad. I think the demographic here is the more
thoughtful and secure type. We realize that someone disagreeing doesn't
invalidate your own opinion or beliefs; it's just something more to think
about. Plus, some especially bad comments are killed outright, which
discourages future abuse. (Most of the things that get killed here would be
+1000 on Reddit, so you can see why things are different between the sites.)

And BTW, I usually don't get dowmodded here for having the "wrong" opinion
here. Sometimes I am shocked, like with this one:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=294691>

I swear, anywhere else that would have been downmodded to oblivion. (Even
though it is not a troll, I really think that.) Instead, people replied
disagreeing with me. Excellent.

The system ain't broken yet.

------
staunch
_"Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it
makes boring reading"_

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

------
thomasmallen
Sites like these are all about a herd mentality. Maybe you're looking for a
forum atmosphere?

~~~
jrockway
Every forum I've ever read is even worse than the social news sites. When
someone disagrees with you here, they reply with an argument. It may not be a
good argument, but at least the reply is related to what they disagree with.
On forums, people reply with things like "I bet you wouldn't say that to my
face." instead of actually arguing the point. This is completely worthless --
why have a discussion forum if you're not going to disagree?

On the Internet, you can argue unrelentingly for your point and not have it
count against you socially. In a casual conversation, someone who does nothing
but argue their point would be "annoying", but on the Internet, that's not
annoying. It's the entire fucking point. (And before the Internet, people
wrote op-eds. Rules for conversation and writing are different. So don't ask
me if I would say that to your face, because your face isn't here.)

~~~
thomasmallen
UbuntuForums is one of the best-run forums I've ever used. Not as good now as
it was a couple years ago, but it's a good model.

------
ericwaller
I voted this up because I think it's the beginning of an interesting
discussion, but (in general) I disagree. I'd like to know what types of
discussions you think suffer the most.

Tech-wise, I think the site is more diverse then ever, there seems to have
been a decline in general lisp-evangelism since I joined about a year ago.

Though I might agree that there is a certain "start-up philosophy" to which
any reference is guaranteed upvotes, but competing ideas are usually just as
well received.

~~~
whalliburton
This observation was in regards to the
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=297080>

Regardless of whether I am right, I am basically the only countering argument
and reduced to a grayed out presence.

I do not care emotionally a bit whether I am read, this is an intellectual
observation regarding YC's downvoting of anti-mainstream thought while
promoting much of the same.

~~~
ojbyrne
You cared enough about it to post this (which seems a bit narcissistic, no
matter what you say). I upmodded your original comment, so right at the moment
it isn't a "grayed out presence" but I'm not going to upmod this.

~~~
whalliburton
Maybe your right, but I just saw a greyed out post (my own) that seemed like
the only good counter (again, maybe only because it's my own viewpoint). The
rest of the discussion did not seem like MEAT, thus this post.

------
mrtron
Criticism without an offer of a solution is pretty useless.

I think software could be better.

I think democracy could be better.

I think humans could live better.

~~~
rms
Capitalism is fundamentally flawed.

~~~
symptic
That's what makes it work.

------
blogimus
I've read through your replies to comments up to the time I'm submitting this
comment.

Please explain _why_ or _how_ you think YC promotes ME TOO mentality.

I'm not disagreeing or agreeing with you, I just want to know better where
you're coming from. For my own view, I see that there tends to be a habit of
mob upvoting of already upvoted comments once comments reach a certain
threshold above other comments in a discussion.

------
hhm
In my opinion, you are doing it wrong. The voting scheme doesn't promote herd
mentality, the voting scheme is used to sort the comments on the threads. Now,
should you measure yourself by your level of karma? NO. The smartest guys here
don't have the greatest karma necessarily, so you shouldn't care either. Say
what you have to say, and don't mind the score you are given because of it. Is
that being cynical? No: because you'll see that your comments with the biggest
score will often be trivial or simply wrong, so if you'd started following the
score you'd start posting trivial and wrong stuff. Don't do that. Just say
what you have to say, learn with us, teach us, and that's it.

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umangjaipuria
Herd mentality = when everyone has the same opinions. Going by the number and
nature of comments, I don't think that is true.

Diversity of thought: Barring phenomena like the Chrome launch, look at the
variety of articles here. I think it's great. Remember that this isn't generic
news, but Hacker News. So it's going to be more internet & technology centric
that your Wall Street Journal.

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lallysingh
It's not the voting scheme causing the herd mentality. People tend to
subscribe to one train of thought until convinced otherwise (which, deep down,
is as much a popularity contest as anything else). It's the human herd you're
really complaining about.

Such complaints, btw, are (-1, Redundant).

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vaksel
maybe turn off voting on comments, but keep voting for stories. That way good
stories get dug up and bad stories don't. And you don't have people voting you
down because you said something they might disagree with.

i.e. today I got voted down(went down to -1) because I said I don't like ads.

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mick_m
Complaints like this turn up ever so often, but I guess Paul is still bitter
about losing the popularity contest back in high school
(<http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html>) and now wants to create a popularity
contest that's geared towards him winning from the get-go. Can't keep him from
doing that, all we can do is ignore the mods.

