Sure. I find it extremely tiring to read about how this is a slippery slope, and how this is somehow oppressive or unusual for American media.
I don't mind folks coming in and saying, "Hey, this is a change that I dislike." But a lot of the discourse here today is just outrage and finger pointing and yelling about free speech absolutism.
I think that HN's downvoting system actually makes it harder to have a reasoned discourse about topics like this, because if I disagree with the prevailing opinion in this community that Twitch is doing a bad thing, it's likely my comment gets strongly downvoted, rather than opening a line of discussion.
I don't know how to solve this. Maybe separate "I disagree" vs "Off-topic/poor quality comment" downvotes?
There's a reasonable discussion to be had about the decision Twitch made. I happen to think it's a good decision, and I'd love to be able to have that discourse in a calm way, but I don't know how to have it in something like HN where comments get swept up in voting and yelling and hostile replies.
I very much agree that unmarked voting systems like HN's do a really poor job of keeping comments "high quality." Everyone has a different definition of quality.
I understand that there are UX challenges to adding different kinds of votes, but I totally agree that the UI affordances we have right now make conversation harder instead of easier.
I wonder if separating "quality" (vote + or -) from "reports" ("excessively rude", "inappropriate", "off-topic") would be useful. I do think that people can be excessively rude and useful at the same time. Edit: So, this would change from "-3 points" -> "-3 points [rude: 3, off-topic: 5]".
I don't mind folks coming in and saying, "Hey, this is a change that I dislike." But a lot of the discourse here today is just outrage and finger pointing and yelling about free speech absolutism.
I think that HN's downvoting system actually makes it harder to have a reasoned discourse about topics like this, because if I disagree with the prevailing opinion in this community that Twitch is doing a bad thing, it's likely my comment gets strongly downvoted, rather than opening a line of discussion.
I don't know how to solve this. Maybe separate "I disagree" vs "Off-topic/poor quality comment" downvotes?
There's a reasonable discussion to be had about the decision Twitch made. I happen to think it's a good decision, and I'd love to be able to have that discourse in a calm way, but I don't know how to have it in something like HN where comments get swept up in voting and yelling and hostile replies.