> On HN this is greatly reduced by the point system and the opacity of bad posts. A bad post fades away so it doesn't look as important as other posts.
The problem is, this functionality is popularity based. Yes, posts that get downvoted are usually bad posts. However, some are simply disliked by the majority of people who wanted to vote on them and are not actually "bad" by the standards of this discussion. Similarly, I have seen toxic posts (that I have downvoted and flagged) upvoted (at least once) when the target of the toxicity was "acceptable".
Worth considering that this isn't simply mechanical: to make those posts fade away requires humans clicking the downvote button. Which requires some kind of culture that includes clicking the button on "bad" posts, for whatever the definition of "bad" is. If there were downvoting on say, YouTube, I'm not sure that it would produce the same results that it does on HN.
Hacker News is indeed a special place on the internet and it would probably be difficult to reproduce its style of discussion. That being said I think it is worth considering why HN has succeeded and to what extent is this a function of the presentation algorithm (upvotes/downvotes)?
It is worth remembering that the visible part of an internet community is a small part of the total possible community. Following the classic 90-9-1 rule there are a lot more people who could participate than people who do participate. This means that the visible face of an online community has a lot of room to change.
> On HN this is greatly reduced by the point system and the opacity of bad posts. A bad post fades away so it doesn't look as important as other posts.
I really dislike that. But, I have put in CSS so that bad posts don't fade away, and enabled show dead so that all messages can be seen. But at least we have the choice!
One of the things that surprised me was how people who are horrible online are even worse offline.
I think there are plenty of online consequences. Post a controversial post and someone will verbally slap, share, shame you. Shaming might be far worse than a physical punch to some people.
I think a lot of people who become trolls don't become trolls for the sake of of trolling. They do it because they're trying to enforce consequences upon someone.
I think consequences are an illusory deterrent personally. People thought real name policies would help. Even with people losing jobs over posting the needle didn't move.
In truth consequences can be an incentive for bad actors. To them saying offensive things and getting a burner account banned is boring compared to tricking people into getting banned.
On HN this is greatly reduced by the point system and the opacity of bad posts. A bad post fades away so it doesn't look as important as other posts.
In real life you can get a punch in the face if you say nasty things to someone.
But on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube most trolls wont ever learn because they just can say whatever they want.