It is all about who participates in the voting. On Reddit (and Digg, I guess), the voting is done by retarded 9-year-old fanbois, and as a result, rewards ideas and comments that appeal to that demographic. Highly rated comments there are often some of the worst material I've ever read in my life. It often makes me pray for my own death. Correspondingly, some good ideas and arguments are often downmodded to -10, even though they are fine comments.<p>Over here, it's not as bad. I think the demographic here is the more thoughtful and secure type. We realize that someone disagreeing doesn't invalidate your own opinion or beliefs; it's just something more to think about. Plus, some especially bad comments are killed outright, which discourages future abuse. (Most of the things that get killed here would be +1000 on Reddit, so you can see why things are different between the sites.)<p>And BTW, I usually don't get dowmodded here for having the "wrong" opinion here. Sometimes I am shocked, like with this one:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=294691" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=294691</a><p>I swear, anywhere else that would have been downmodded to oblivion. (Even though it is not a troll, I really think that.) Instead, people replied disagreeing with me. Excellent.<p>The system ain't broken yet.
<i>"Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading"</i><p><a href="http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html</a>
I voted this up because I think it's the beginning of an interesting discussion, but (in general) I disagree. I'd like to know what types of discussions you think suffer the most.<p>Tech-wise, I think the site is more diverse then ever, there seems to have been a decline in general lisp-evangelism since I joined about a year ago.<p>Though I might agree that there is a certain "start-up philosophy" to which any reference is guaranteed upvotes, but competing ideas are usually just as well received.
Criticism without an offer of a solution is pretty useless.<p>I think software could be better.<p>I think democracy could be better.<p>I think humans could live better.
I've read through your replies to comments up to the time I'm submitting this comment.<p>Please explain <i>why</i> or <i>how</i> you think YC promotes ME TOO mentality.<p>I'm not disagreeing or agreeing with you, I just want to know better where you're coming from. For my own view, I see that there tends to be a habit of mob upvoting of already upvoted comments once comments reach a certain threshold above other comments in a discussion.
In my opinion, you are doing it wrong. The voting scheme doesn't promote herd mentality, the voting scheme is used to sort the comments on the threads. Now, should you measure yourself by your level of karma? NO. The smartest guys here don't have the greatest karma necessarily, so you shouldn't care either. Say what you have to say, and don't mind the score you are given because of it. Is that being cynical? No: because you'll see that your comments with the biggest score will often be trivial or simply wrong, so if you'd started following the score you'd start posting trivial and wrong stuff. Don't do that. Just say what you have to say, learn with us, teach us, and that's it.
Herd mentality = when everyone has the same opinions. Going by the number and nature of comments, I don't think that is true.<p>Diversity of thought: Barring phenomena like the Chrome launch, look at the variety of articles here. I think it's great. Remember that this isn't generic news, but Hacker News. So it's going to be more internet & technology centric that your Wall Street Journal.
It's not the voting scheme causing the herd mentality. People tend to subscribe to one train of thought until convinced otherwise (which, deep down, is as much a popularity contest as anything else). It's the human herd you're really complaining about.<p>Such complaints, btw, are (-1, Redundant).
maybe turn off voting on comments, but keep voting for stories. That way good stories get dug up and bad stories don't. And you don't have people voting you down because you said something they might disagree with.<p>i.e. today I got voted down(went down to -1) because I said I don't like ads.
Complaints like this turn up ever so often, but I guess Paul is still bitter about losing the popularity contest back in high school (<a href="http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html" rel="nofollow">http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html</a>) and now wants to create a popularity contest that's geared towards him winning from the get-go. Can't keep him from doing that, all we can do is ignore the mods.