To troll on HN, you just need to operate within some constraints. Two criteria need to be satisfied.
First, to prevent your troll from being greyed out, you need to be in alignment with the dominant Hacker News zeitgeist. Downvotes don't matter so long as enough people counter them with upvotes.
Second, to prevent being flagged, you need to craft your message in such a way that it could possibly be interpreted as well meaning. "Assume good faith" is a loophole to be exploited: "suck it bitch" overt hostility won't fly, but since "I'm just asking questions"-style disingenousness often can't be differentiated from honest inquiry, it makes it through the filter.
If you can master those techniques, you can troll any unpopular outgroup on HN without limit.
You can't troll the dominant faction without getting downvoted into oblivion, so the dominant faction believes trolling doesn't happen, but as for whether trolling of outgroups is happening...
... we can't say, as that would mean doubting the good faith of those "just asking questions". Nevertheless, we can observe that certain demographics who frequently get the "just asking questions" treatment are severely underrepresented on HN.
Due to the tree structure of comments though, those people can quickly and easily be side-stepped. I'd also suggest that the "just asking questions" behavior performs relatively poorly here because there is likely some one who is going to be able to thoroughly and resoundingly answer. The point of such behavior is to impact the audience and it can be successful because its easier to ask hard questions (with provocative insinuations) than it is to answer them, but it backfires badly when those questions are answered.
Out of curiosity, what 'outgroups' are you talking about? Some social groups are simply unpopular because we consider their views and perspectives to be disgusting or at least worthy of social censure; open bigots, people that don't wear shoes inside convenience stores. I ask because I've started to associate vague references to 'outgroups' with 'horrifying bigots that identify as conservative' and I wouldn't want to unduly lump whatever group you're talking about in with them.
I've deliberately used the generic term of "outgroup" because I think that the loophole present in "assume good faith" can be exploited to drive away any outgroup.
The "outgroup" could be "horrifying bigots". It could be also be "economically right-leaning thinkers in a forum where the zeitgeist leans left".
What I'm personally concerned about the most though are demographics which are underrepresented in tech and even more underrepresented on HN, most obviously women but speculatively also Black people, Hispanics, and so on.
(This thread has over 300 comments so you may not have seen my other posts, but if you want further clarification you may wish to seek them out.)
I disagree that the tree structure of comments provides a sufficient remedy for pervasive low-grade hostility, and I posit that the problem of de facto exclusion of outgroups under "assume good faith" is unsolvable.
Concretely, tropes such as women being uninterested in programming, or having it easy thanks to equal opportunity programs, or bearing responsibility when they are sexually harassed, are considered legitimate under "assume good faith" on HN and so get discussed endlessly. Such discussions have the effect of driving women away and diminishing their participation, in anonymous-optional internet forums even more than in the office where freewheeling discussion of such topics would constitute a hostile workplace and be subject to EEOC sanction. The result is similar to discriminatory exclusion from a professional society, even though the mechanism is not a formal barrier but instead the fostering of an unwelcoming environment.
To be clear, I don't believe in the slightest that this outcome is what HN moderator dang would wish for. I think he's done amazing work to guide discussion in productive directions, and HN is noticeably more civil than it was a few years ago.
But I also believe that the "assume good faith" model has severe, underappreciated, deeply consequential problems. I think that a comment moderation system like RadioPaper or Gawker/Kinja, which allows outgroups a say in how much dreck they have to tolerate to participate, holds promise for avoiding those problems, and I would like to see how closely that model can approach the ideal of open debate and participation from a different direction.
Now if only RadioPaper had tech topic focus page, and I could use it like HN, lobste.rs, Slashdot, etc...
Pretty much sums it up, and is another reason my involvement with HN has decreased significantly over the last year or so. This mode of operation is gross to me.
What kind of opinions are you guys seeing get trolled/downvoted out?
The only things I've seen eat dirt like that are jokes, and comments that were worded in an inflammatory way / presenting opinions as unassailable facts (even if they were right in my opinion). Mainly when people insult the Node.js ecosystem or some flash-in-the-pan new programming language
I haven't seen any Twitter-style anger over "sea lioning" *, or Reddit-style castigation over anything even slightly unpopular
* where people are having a public conversation on a public forum, but act like any attempt to engage with them is invading their private space
First, to prevent your troll from being greyed out, you need to be in alignment with the dominant Hacker News zeitgeist. Downvotes don't matter so long as enough people counter them with upvotes.
Second, to prevent being flagged, you need to craft your message in such a way that it could possibly be interpreted as well meaning. "Assume good faith" is a loophole to be exploited: "suck it bitch" overt hostility won't fly, but since "I'm just asking questions"-style disingenousness often can't be differentiated from honest inquiry, it makes it through the filter.
If you can master those techniques, you can troll any unpopular outgroup on HN without limit.
You can't troll the dominant faction without getting downvoted into oblivion, so the dominant faction believes trolling doesn't happen, but as for whether trolling of outgroups is happening...
... we can't say, as that would mean doubting the good faith of those "just asking questions". Nevertheless, we can observe that certain demographics who frequently get the "just asking questions" treatment are severely underrepresented on HN.