Yeah, my experience has been that any downvote system will turn an audience that's divided 51-49 to one that's partitioned 51-0 in very short order. If anything, I've come to the conclusion that downvoting should be completely removed from most online platforms.

Not so.

Reddit's system works that if a post get 1000 upvotes and 500 downvotes (66% liked), it will be scored worse than a post than gets 10 upvotes and 0 downvotes.

Basically what it does is penalize controversy, which is the perfect decision for a website that is about mining the most humorous and widely-liked response.

Anything that is 51% liked and 49% disliked (e.g. political individuals mentioned in a non-political thread) gets bombed to the bottom almost immediately, which is exactly what most redditors want.

The other brilliant thing it does it let the user adjust this prioritization if they so desire.

The point is that the 49% eventually leave when their every contribution get bombed to the bottom immediately. Then the 49% of the remaining 51% get bullied out.

Reddit's system encourages purity spirals, especially when the main topic of discussion is how terrible everyone else is.

While downvotes can drive people out of communities, I have to contrast what happens in no-downvote communities, where often the top commentary is, to be blunt, far worse because corrections can only exist in the form of responses (and so more engagement).

Downvote-based systems are better at having the consensus viewpoint and quality content bubble to the top, at the expense of pummelling some of the dissenting views.

Upvote-only systems seem to have worse stuff bubble to the top.

What's happening in Hnews then? Is it bad?

It's not as bad on HN in my opinion, for a few reasons:

1. Comments cannot fall below -4 points

2. Downvoted comments only get greyed out, not hidden entirely

3. Most topics on HN are not political (though there are certainly exceptions)

4. The community here is (usually) a bit more mature than on other sites like Reddit

There's an inherent account age requirement on HN though, tied to the number of upvotes an account has

Surprisingly many topics are political [1], and an answer the very right-wing libertarian consensus here disagrees with will absolutely be voted all the way down.

[1] Often, the assertion "this topic is not or should not be political" is political. Because politics is how we organize society on a large scale and saying things should be exempt from that, guess what, is a political opinion.

Dunno, I'm pretty sure I've seen calls to break up or even nationalize Google and similar sentiments at the top quite a lot. That doesn't strike me as particularly right-wing?

The groupthink here isn't straight party-line, but it does have a lean.

That's moving the goalposts quite a bit from "...absolutely be voted all the way down."

Not really. It just means the topics people are touchy about don't follow the party line. They're still touchy and political about them.

I actually agree, I just think libertarian right wing is a mischaracterization, and I think it matters because the stereotype of the tech nerd is the atlas shrugged-toting libertarian, but HN doesn't really match that stereotype most of the time, I think.

I'm sure it happens here, too. I know that if I start getting voted into oblivion, I walk away for a while. Clearly the community disagreed with my thoughts and it's not worth it to continue to engage.

Ironically, it doesn't affect me at all on Reddit. I have such low expectations for the platform that I don't even notice my own karma score nor do I bother to look at posts of mine to see how they're being received. HN makes your score much more prominent so it's easy to see it moving and you know immediately whether you've said something controversial somewhere.

HN is a rare exception to this effect due to its more focused niche (though the bubble effect is definitely there to some degree). I'm more referencing larger platforms, particularly reddit.

A subreddit tends to be more focused than HN. I'd chalk it up to user maturity, not that HN is without great fault on this either.

Not all users can downvote,only few can.

This is why I stopped posting on reddit and why I still feel somewhat comfortable posting on HN. It's been years since reddit crossed the line and just became a left-wing echo chamber like twitter (or any other mainstream media, really). I'm neither liberal nor conservative, but I can't stand participating in a community where you're expected to play along with the mob or else be vilified.