Some forums don't have downvotes at all, and I find that controversial discussion flourishes there. The moderators also are much more laid back than in HN; they enforce rules like spam and illegal content rather than the task the HN mods have tasked themselves with: preventing flamewar, even when good discussion and education results from it, i.e they see themselves as parents, acting in a preventative measure, we are the children. To further the analogy, there is literally an account flag that the HN mods can put onto your account[0] which puts you into a 'timeout', like sitting in the corner wearing the dunce hat.
This was done to me, such that if I post too quickly, I am banned from posting except for twice every two hours for a while. This, I believe, will stick with my account for as long as I have it - because I apparently post too
Read the rest
fast, engage with too many people etc.
One gets the message: "You are posting too fast. Please slow down." Mother and father dang and sctb have told me off. I must therefore go to bed early.
I think it's also a fabulous bit of trickery pulled here - there aren't "rules" for HN, there are "guidelines"; this leads you to believe it is laid back, and being guidelines, they are not enforced. How wrongly one is misled! They are rules in evey sense of the word, as rules are differed from guidelines only in their enforcement. I know many places which say they have rules and enforce them less than HN enforces its "guidelines".
Slavoj Zizek made a point here I think is relevant - when the father tells his son "Visit your grandmother, for if you don't then I will punish you", the son is much more likely to rebel, to complain - he reacts against authority. But another father may say "Please see your grandmother, she is very sick and old, she misses you" -- the circumstance is the same, but the mode of violence used is different, and agruably much more powerful. Few sons can resist this kind of force.
[0] https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/master/news.arc#L15...