This isn't a place where dissenting opinions get upvotes. Why should they? I think a fair of posters with plenty of karma are still willing to post things that get massively downvoted and cause a reaction. I'm getting better at it. I keep a mental model of how I've reacted to HN, look at the page - "there's the reaction, down five or ten points", "hmm, I'm guess down and up votes balanced", "ah, that was a crowd pleaser".

I don't think hn is more broken than America or the Internet or whatever.

But HN wants to be different, with its quirky rules like not being allowed to downvote posts and replies, or needing a certain amount of karma to be able to downvote comments, and the time limits on edits etc., instead of just following the basic Reddit model.

So clearly someone at HN thought that a simple free-for-all system wasn't good enough, prone to abuse, and decided to make some changes, but HN isn't good enough either; it's still too easy for 3-4 downvoters to prevent thousands of people from seeing a comment they don't want to be seen.

It's too easy to suppress a side or view with fewer supporters here.

One thing HN should have borrowed is how some subreddits don't show a post/comment's score until N hours have passed.

If votes don't affect a comment's visibility for a while then everybody may have a chance to be heard. For more severe violations like spam or harassment, there's always the Flag button.

There's a pandemic on. Voting has been a bit wonky this year, probably because of the pandemic. People are cranky and scared and yadda.

But normally HN is much more tolerant of dissent than most online spaces, assuming it's done right. Rants that call other members names or that implicitly or explicitly suggest "This will be downvoted because you are all bad people" or similar is not how to do that.

That kind of polarization does not just happen for no reason; people reach that frustration after repeatedly seeing themselves and others being downvoted anyway, no matter how flowery and sugared their dissent is.

Downvoters don't care how polite someone is, if they're saying something they don't want to be seen. It's a zero cost action for them, and easily lets them control what opinions other readers see about a topic.

Example: In every thread about browsers, if most people say they dislike Edge, anyone simply saying "Hey I like Edge, it's not so bad" gets downvoted.

So after a while that Edge user will be preemptively defensive the next time they voice their opinion, if they even feel like participating anymore.

HN is a place I spend a lot of time because the culture here is reasonable.

To me, saying "Hey I like Edge, it's not so bad" is pointless shit-stirring. It's looking to start trouble for no real reason.

It's a low value comment. The guidelines actively discourage that, so it's not surprising that it would be downvoted, having nothing to do with "disagreeing" per se.

If you have something meaty and thoughtful to say that disagrees with the majority view, the HN crowd will give you a fair shake. Jumping into the midst of a discussion where everyone is saying "This is junk!" to say "Well, I like it!" isn't thoughtful or meaty.

HN is like an Ivy League freshman class. Most of the kids are smart, opinionated and sure they will rule the world some day.Many have some pretty nice accomplishments. But you scratch below the surface and you will notice they are also just a bunch of kids: insecure,especially about their intelligence,they take themselves way too seriously, love one-up each other and beyond their close area of knowledge they have painfully naive//cliche views.

Dont take this site too seriously, especially since in the last 2-3 years it has been infested with "guerilla marketers"

Apart from an obvious problem of too many people having downvoting privileges, mods here also silently downweight some accounts even though they leave perfectly good comments. So there are two parts of this problem: mods being assholes towards some people regardless of their comments and mods letting too many people downvote comments. Same problem with flagging, except that flagging doesn't just make some discussions taboo, it also provokes mods to come up with a reason to issue a warning to silence such discussions even more if they feel like it.

But let's be honest, HN was never a place for dissenting views or "intellectual curiosity" as they used to say, it was always a very US, Silicon Valley capitalist-owned place, where the mods, YC tried to push people into one or another direction, push people to think certain way, suppress and disallow some viewpoints under various pretenses. I'm sure you've seen them claim guidelines breaking of people expressing some views, but never the opposite views if the views happened to be a common SV ideology (for example, I don't think I've ever seen an "let's ban sexist words" diversity activism being warned as "ideological flamebait" or such activists being banned, but it did happen with people holding the opposite views, just like it did with the guy from Google). All of this nudges people into echo chambers.

I'll add that it used to have more technical discussions a few years ago, but not so much anymore, you have to go to lobsters and reddit for that, even if they suck, they are at least still there.