This feels like an instance of negativity-bias. If you're willing to self-censor to avoid downvotes shouldn't you also be willing to shill / virtue signal for upvotes?
My problem with downvotes isn't the effect on my score. It's the fact that the font becomes paler. Dissenting opinions are singled out in a way that makes them look bad/wrong. I also don't like how the UX doesn't represent the distribution. A post with no votes will look like a post with 50 upvotes and 50 downvotes.
I am fine with downvotes, and with some UX mechanism to let people know that a post is being downvoted. But I think the current UX engenders groupthink.
Is that true? I've gotten hella downvotes but still not shadow banned. I think it's because people read my comments in their own voice rather than in my voice and take offence to the words whereas it's just a way of communicating using signals in order to point to an underlying meaning
Do you know a time period where you got more than 2 downvoted comments in a row? I couldn’t find that from quickly going through your comment history. Sure there’s a decent amt of downvoted comments but the non downvoted ones not only are much larger in number, they will happen 5+ times in a row. I threw out a random number. But mostly was saying something like 7 or 10 downvoted greyed out comments in a row over some number of days depending on some factors could get you shadowbanned.
Yes, this is the worst aspect of HN's design in my opinion: the paler font is essentially the equivalent of silencing dissent.
What is worse, it is an entirely silent way of silencing dissent. I would love to experiment with the other end of the spectrum: not only should the number of downvotes be visible, downvoting someone should also require a reason to be given, in the form of a post. And it should be possible to downvote those reasons too, with the algorithm adjusting the original downvote's weight based on the score of the downvote reason.
What if I told you that you can just click on the comment permlink, and that gets rid of the graying. Nobody's being "silenced" here; it's just a way to quickly assess the level of confidence in a HN comment.
HN (and many, MANY other sites, including forums, product reviews, search engines) confuses "popularity" with "quality". If there was one thing on the Internet I could fix by waving a magic wand, it would be this idea that more people [liking|linking|upvoting] something means it is better. Crowdsourced curation doesn't work.
My problem with downvotes isn't the effect on my score. It's the fact that the font becomes paler. Dissenting opinions are singled out in a way that makes them look bad/wrong. I also don't like how the UX doesn't represent the distribution. A post with no votes will look like a post with 50 upvotes and 50 downvotes.
I am fine with downvotes, and with some UX mechanism to let people know that a post is being downvoted. But I think the current UX engenders groupthink.