I occasionally read Y Combinator’s ‘Hackernews’ but each time I do, I’m reminded how it resembles Winston’s world in the novel 1984.

My visits are programming related; I want to know what new developments have been occurring in the programming world. Occasionally it will also serve as a news aggregator in general. To be fair, to this end, it serves a useful niche, and I will continue visiting the site for this purpose.

What I take issue with is the commenting system, which borders on toxic because there is no diversity of opinion, and the ‘upvote’ system in place discourages any deviations in any other direction than the one the majority of the readers prefer.

Also, while it’s understandable that a moderator should control comment quality, the current system employed within HN is ridiculously authoritarian.

In other words, they allow you to write things as long as they are the things they allow you to write. Pick any color as long as it’s blue, that kind of thing.

The so-called ‘karma’ system where your comment gets upvoted or downvoted is already bad enough. If you write ’language X is better than language Y’ and the majority of HNers disagree, then your comment gets downvoted all the way to virtual hell.

A system like this generates mindless, mind-numbing ’everybody-thinks-alike’ groupthink echochamber that is basically a waste of time for an intelligent reader.

A better method would’ve been to assign different colors for agreement and disagreement, so that both types of comments would become popular: green for agreements and red for disagreements and blue for irrelevant.

A variation of this employed in the game review section of Steam. Positive comments are blue upvotes, negative comments are blue downvote, then these reviews themselves are subject to additional meta-review by comment-readers.

Had HNews had employed something similar, you would then have an interesting collection of comments grouped by color and see how the general readership views different topics.

As it is now, if your comment elicits strong disagreement, it will get ‘flagged’ which means nobody will be able to see or read it. Very 1984.

I rarely if ever comment myself (I prefer writing on my own platform), but I read a lot of comments on HN. This morning, I found some comments that had generated lively discussions, but I could not read the original and very-much-flagged comment because it was rendered invisible.

Such a system also has more insidious effects on the people frequenting the site. It force-teaches intellectual subservience, and kills creativity and originality. In other words, if everybody thinks alike, nobody is really thinking at all.