I'm fully prepared to be downvoted into oblivion and called naive or worse, but in the USA we have non-profit organizations. You might have heard of things like the YMCA, BGCA, etc.
Additionally, most municipalities run community centers and libraries which provide programming. The issue is there is declining interest in participating in these kinds of activities.
It's a societal cultural shift, and those are not things that can be shifted by policy as can be seen with various failed attempts at social engineering in Singapore and China.
Yeah the highest participation areas have significant poverty and lean conservative.
My point is that it isn't an unreasonable solution and it achieves everything outlined in the blog. The only catch is that it's incompatible with their politics. :)
i disagree. i mean, sure, they could have said "i expect everyone will disagree with me" instead of "I'm fully prepared to be downvoted into oblivion", and it would have meant the same thing. but neither is complaining about downvotes like the messages you link to.
and quite frankly i disagree that asking for explanations when you downvote is the same as complaining about downvotes because that again could have been worded as: "if you disagree please explain". would that make a difference?
the point is just using the word downvote should not be the trigger but how the message is worded overall. there is also a rule about charitable reading. i read that comment and if i ask myself, is that person complaining about downvotes, my reading is, no they are not.
frankly i find people complaining about other people talking about downvotes just as bad. so i think this whole subthread is in violation.
but to end with something constructive, i think a better response to the initial comment would be:
mentioning downvotes triggers people and drags down the quality of discussion (as this thread here now pretty much proves). if you want to express that your opinion is controversial, maybe just state that, or, even better, just leave it out and focus on your actual message, regardless of what you believe others will think of you because that too can distract from the actual discussion that we want to have here (again, this thread is proof of that).
Both your first examples are clearly against HN mods' expectations as a close review of the searches I give above will show.
Asking for reasons for disagreement (not downvotes) is legitimate, and I challenge you to find any instances in which mods admonish this practice.
Again, the mods' comments form a large body of informal guidance on HN practices. Those practices are explicitly NOT written precisely or in detail for both brevity and flexibility.
The root comment in this thread would have been more effective without the downvote-grousing throat clearing: "in the USA we have non-profit organizations. You might have heard of things like the YMCA, BGCA, etc." Even that 2nd sentence is probably needlessly provocative, and could be rewritten as "Such as the YMCA...".
Spending time with HN may be useful in refining rhetorical technique in such ways.
Oh, and for the record, by no means do I agree with mods in all cases (and I'm absolutely not one myself). I'll occasionally downvote, or flag, admonishments if I find them entirely off-base or tone-deaf. But for the most part I understand why the guidelines and actions exist. Where I disagree, it's generally because the guidelines themselves impose an inequality-amplifying bias to the site.
