>there's a total shutdown of public discourse as most people won't go on record to say anything that might not be consistent with the party line.
>...driving anyone with a deviant opinion behind closed doors. Soon enough, everyone is screaming into an echo chamber.
Funny, I've always thought downvotes on HN encouraged the same, albeit to a lesser degree. It's one thing to use downvotes as a moderation tool, submerging comments from others with whom you don't agree. It's another thing to "penalize" (FWIW) a person because you disagree with him/her. That it seems acceptable is a smaller symptom of the bigger problem.
Reminds me of the Black Mirror episode #1 this season.
Maybe you mistyped, or maybe it's just too late and I'm not parsing things right, but I'm having a hard time distinguishing between the two options here:
"It's one thing to use downvotes as a moderation tool, submerging comments from others with whom you don't agree. It's another thing to "penalize" (FWIW) a person because you disagree with him/her."
Regarding how down votes are used on HN, there are those who use them to express disagreement (PG weighed in a while ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171), though there are others who think this isn't the best use of down votes.
Maybe we need "non-substantive", "don't agree", and "flag/uncivil". I can see how that could overcomplicate things, though.
Yeah, it was too late...for me. Sorry, I wasn't very clear.
By "punishing people", I meant the whole "karma" thing. So, using downvotes to score comments is considered a form of thread moderation. Ok, that's one thing. However, also assigning a score to people based, in part, on whether others frequently agree with them really encourages group-think. There is at least some perceivable utility in downvoting comments, but what's the value of scoring whether people frequently agree with someone?
BTW, I'm not going meta here, as I think it's very relevant to this thread.
>there are others who think this isn't the best use of down votes.
Yeah, I am also one who believes that, even with comments, downvotes for disagreement have a similar--though perhaps lesser--effect of discouraging diversity of ideas. I guess the heart of it is that disagreement is considered a legitimate reason for downvoting, whether it's comments or karma that is impacted.
Upvotes plus the current flags for incivility/inappropriateness should be enough for moderation, and would remove the disincentive for the expression of diverse ideas.
There's not really any point in having rules you can't enforce. So unless you're going (and able) to penalize someone for down-voting inappropriately, just leave it to "democracy" and let each person cast their down-votes for whatever reason pleases them personally.