Does allowing downvoting encourage groupthink?

HN is a like a benevolent authoritarian country, say Singapore (I'm sure the analogy is flawed but that's not material). There is a tradeoff between order and giving equal consideration to all opinions. It sometimes rubs one the wrong way, but it leads to an overall quality that doesn't really exist in any bigger forums, and is only really possible because of the relative alignment of most users' views.

It works for small, non-platform community forum, because you can just go somewhere else if you don't like it.

Before I deleted my reddit account I was convinced that downvoting had more of an effect on what frontpaged on a subreddit than upvoting not in that the algorithms gave more weight to them but a few downvotes would cause an article to disappear quickly and not get more upvotes.

If you posted anything along the lines of "maybe Java has some good points" or "I am at least partially into programming for the money" you would get always get downvoted into oblivion on proggit for instance.

It's a widespread phenomenon, though I don't know whether it's widely observed.

My observation is that "downvote to oblivion" (e.g. hidden or grey) seems to facilitate and incentivize upvote/downvote wars/brigading where one side tries to erase its opposition rather than letting it just sink on its own.

In practice downvoting seems to mostly be a "dislike" button. Personally I'd prefer an upvote-only system or at least downvotes that are organized by specific category such as spam, trolling, or flamebait. I'm not even sure that off-topic posts outside of those categories should be downvoted - I would expect other posts to rise above them organically in most cases.

A final reason why I like upvotes rather than downvotes is that it seems to emphasize the positive rather than the negative, and people might feel better getting few upvotes vs. lots of downvotes. I've made many carefully thought out posts here and elsewhere that get downvoted immediately; it left me feeling puzzled and demoralized.

I try to avoid downvoting, yet I too feel the temptation whenever the button is there.

This might be contextuaally informative to the topic, "Construal Level Theory in Organizational Research"

[1]:https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-0...

There are other studies particularly focused on different social media sites, but a lot boils down to social/psychological impacts. Hope it is insightful.

Humans, by design, cultivate orthodoxy across cultural lines which usually correlates with emotional investment on the parts of individuals. Put simply, when people can't agree to disagree, they squabble, often viciously.

Downvoting facilitates the formation of islands of like-minded thinkers quickly on websites that allow people to connect to each other (any site with groups/friends). For something like Reddit, which is literally a collection of islands like this, the tool is a good fit for building cohesion. Without downvoting, people will still resort to being unpleasant to each other to create homogeny; they find like-minded thinkers, group together as friends and are unpleasant as a group to people not in the group (how you can have definite cultural groups on twitter).

HN downvotes are often when:

- someone speaks positively about crypto

- someone speaks not positively about the American Dem party

- someone mentions the above reasons for downvotes (as seen here soon)

Those are both very petty and, among a group of likeminded intelligent people, is pretty sad.

I don't downvote. If I don't agree I'll say something and accept the punishment.

yes absolutely. if you look at the crypto communities censoring dissenters was key to their fraud

Yes, your observation is accurate.

The average intelligence of HN users with downvote capabilities isn't as high as one would hope. Going against the grain gets downvoted regardless of whether you're right or not.

All discussion forums (digital and flesh-bound) are susceptible to the echo chamber effect.