I have never written a line of Go, and have only a casual acquaintance with Haskell. I'm not a Microsoft fan but spend approximately zero HN time bashing them. I would not attempt to write any sort of crypto anything in Javascript. I am not a libertarian. I am slightly interested in crypto-currency but have never owned any. I think Hayek is way overrated.

My karma score is approaching 8000, and I promise it's enough to downvote other people.

I dare say there is some groupthink on HN. There is groupthink everywhere where like-minded people congregate. But I've seen a very wide range of ideas treated with respect here, and pretty much the same very wide range of ideas treated with contempt, depending on who happens to be reading and responding.

> If you are a new user and you actually want to communicate with people...and hold a minority opinion...you will be downvoted out of visibility.

I was a new user. I hold many minority opinions (including ones diametrically opposed to those you have named as critical points of HN consensus, particularly on the issue of political ideology), and have expressed them from very early in my time on HN. I haven't been downvoted out of visibility.

I suspect that you are both misattributing the cause of the karma hit your earlier account took and falsely generalizing from that misattribution.

I wasn't looking for congratulations, I was pointing out that your claim is factually incorrect. I hold plenty of the opinions you say are minority opinions. So far as I know, I was neither much more nor much less typical of the HN population when I was new here than I am now. But I did OK and continue to do so.

It's perfectly obvious that holding a minority opinion can't guarantee getting downvoted into oblivion, for the boring reason that you can hold that opinion without expressing it, and in that case no one can possibly downvote you for it.

Of course you might (very reasonably) not want to censor yourself to that extent. Very well: all you need do is have some other things you can talk interesting about besides your shortlist of pet dislikes. Then the upvotes you get from being interesting on other topics will outweigh the downvotes you allegedly get from daring not to be a libertarian. Although, I repeat: I'm not a libertarian, I've dared to express not-libertarian views more than once, and I don't recall ever getting wiped out by downvotes as a result. I've seen plenty of other not-libertarian comments that aren't invisibly light grey. So you might consider the possibility that what you got hammered for was not the mere fact of expressing an unpopular opinion, but something about how you expressed it.

Now, even the approach outlined in the previous paragraph might not be enough, if what you say about your pet dislikes gets you not merely downvoted but hellbanned. (That's the thing where your comments are invisible except to you, the moderators, and people with the "showdead" feature turned on, so you never get any karma or any replies ever again.)

But -- barring cockups and miscarriages of justice, both of which inevitably happen but are pretty rare -- that will only happen if what you say is not merely unpopular but particularly stupid, or repeatedly boring, or something else of the sort to attract the attention of a moderator and make them think "This person is not adding anything positive to HN by being there". So don't do that. Be civil. Be interesting. Don't try to turn HN into a political flamewar. It's not really that difficult.

I often disagree with other posters here on HN - sometimes just to play devil's advocate and stimulate conversation around a certain point or points.

I've been down-voted just a few times for expressing my opinion when I present a well-reasoned, logical argument. (Unfortunately I've been down-voted many times trying to be funny or posting a comment that's taken in an offensive way). I think you'll find that having a debate or even just a conversation with more than one side being taken is often the best way to see the whole subject.

I am none of the things you mentioned (well, I'm not really a Microsoft booster) and I got downvote privileges within 3 months of opening my account. I'm not sure what it is you've been doing to draw ire, but it's far from universal.

Your own biases are showing. I am interested in none of those things, not even the bits in your edit (and in particular, think that libertarianism is damagingly naive), yet I accrue a few votes here and there. I have plenty of karma. Seriously, the downvote mechanism is overrated anyway, and is one of the most poorly implemented features of HN - if you're using access to that as a yardstick for value on the site, I'd suggest reviewing your expectations.

I accrued 188 points on my last account before it just stopped, like I was invisible...so I logged in with another account and couldn't even see my other posts.

I'm not saying that I want to downvote people...I'm saying that you haven't been downvoted into oblivion because you don't disagree with people.

Start commenting with a contrary opinion and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Also..."Your own biases are showing" might sounds like a reasonable and measured thing to say to someone, when you say it to yourself in your head, but its not. Somehow the rest of you have no bias?

And are you saying that I should ignore conservations that I disagree with to protect my votes...??? That's exactly what I was saying happens here. It's a self censorship that leads to this massive amount of consensus on everything from posts to comments.

> Start commenting with a contrary opinion and you'll see what I'm talking about.

I've been involved in a number of highly controversial threads, often disagreeing with the dominant view expressed in the thread, don't meet most of the standards you suggest are required to gain significant positive karma [1], and yet have over 10K karma with a current avg of 2.55.

> And are you saying that I should ignore conservations that I disagree with to protect my votes...???

I would suggest that its not disagreement with your opinions that is causing you to accumulate negative karma.

> It's a self censorship that leads to this massive amount of consensus on everything from posts to comments.

I don't see this consensus you are complaining about (and its interesting that the people complaining about supposed consensus here don't agree on what that consensus is. I suspect that's because the complaints tend to come from people that are -- likely unconsciously -- overweighting the prominence of the views that they disagree with and thus seeing a hostile consensus, and a different hostile consensus that other people see.)

[1] in this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7973724

When you are accusing other people of being biased and pandering to groupthink, it's entirely reasonable for others to point out your own biases. If you think it's hurtful to say, then you should re-examine your own commentary, because you're calling the entire community insular and biased.

And yes, your problem on your previous account was hellbanning, not downmodding per se. It is easy to get the two confused, because it's not easy to get clear info about either. Anyway, if you want to see my opinion on downmodding here, check my profile - it agrees with some of what you say about downvoting, but that is a separate issue to the stereotypes you're throwing out. The profile could probably do with updating, but it's been the same words for over two years (there used to be another section on humour, but that's loosened up a bit, so I removed it).

I loathe the downmodding system here, but it doesn't follow that this means the community is all about groupthink or the stereotypes you're promoting.

> I accrued 188 points on my last account before it just stopped, like I was invisible...so I logged in with another account and couldn't even see my other posts.

Herein lies your problem. You don't get that from disagreeing with the group or challenging the status quo; as far as I can tell, you need to have serious problems with the form, not the content of your comments to achieve that state.

If you literally couldn't see your other posts, wouldn't that suggest that your other profile was hellbanned or something, not that people just stopped upvoting you?

I like Microsoft; I think Bitcoin is stupid. I'm not particularly (for HN) libertarian.

I don't get many downvotes and when I do I can usually understand why.

Perhaps people expressing minority views are just doing so in sub-optimal ways?

(Having said that I tend to agree that any threads that are MS vs Google vs Apple are death.)

Is downvoting other people an important part of HN, though? It's important that someone is doing it responsibly to keep things clean, but upvoting gems and adding value to discussion through intelligent comments seem like they would be far more valuable activities for HN.

Well, that's kind of my point. You are at the mercy of people who disagree with you if you are in the minority. If you disagree with the consensus you will be downvoted to the point that you can't be seen anymore.

I think that differing views add value.

Having contrary opinions just disappear so that everyone can keep restating the same thing to each other is really frustrating.

EDIT: Clarification...

Fair enough. I see the theory of that. Does it happen in practice? Are there comments that were intelligent, adding to the discussion, not being mean, and so on... which were then downvoted to the point where they couldn't be seen?

I don't think I've seen it happen on HN, but I have seen it on other sites. I hypothesize that there is actually a craving for intelligent but unusual viewpoints on HN.

In this case, disagreement isn't the problem, it's being snarky that is.

Complaining about downvotes isn't cool either.

Not if what a downvote means changed that drastically recently. I never complained about downvotes, because I believed in the community collective wisdom. However, in the past few weeks, I've seen many cases of downvotes being used to basically communicate that "I disagree with you and your six-paragraphs, coherent, civil post, which is even on-topic, but I'm too lazy to write my own comment explaining why, so have a downvote."

I'm seriously thinking on putting some effort into collecting some examples and starting a discussion on the topic, because it's IMHO very bad tendency.

EDIT: Although in the case of your parent post downvotes are understandable.

pg has said many times in the past that it's OK to downvote for disagreement -- even if a comment is civil, coherent, on-topic, etc. (I usually prefer to voice disagreement in such a case, but don't always have the time/energy.)

It's usually self-correcting. A lot more people can upvote than downvote, and most people don't like seeing good comments in the gray.

Fuck you.