https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot#History

> Slashdot was preceded by Rob Malda's personal website "Chips & Dips", which launched in October 1997,[11] featured a single "rant" each day about something that interested its author – typically something to do with Linux or open source software. At the time, Malda was a student at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, majoring in computer science. The site became "Slashdot" in September 1997 under the slogan "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters," and quickly became a hotspot on the Internet for news and information of interest to computer geeks.[12]

2020 - 1997 = 23 years ago...I happen to recall that point in my life and know I was on it at that time...I logged back in and tried to find my numerical userid (I think it used to increment, so a low number was a bit of a feather in one's cap), but it seems they changed the naming scheme, I can't seem to find a join date on my profile, and as far as I can tell older comments (prior to 2002) are not archived anymore?

> Slashdot used to have "flavoured" up/downvotes, and you could set the multipliers in your preferences! So you could turn everyone else's +1funny vote into a -2 in your view if you didn't like the site's sense of humor.

Ya, abilities like this I think could make HN a more valuable site, from a study of human behavioral psychology perspective, at fairly massive scale. I can see why @dang wouldn't want to make this a global change, as it very well would come with negative consequences along with the positive, but if it could be implemented as a mode that posts on certain topics (of the culture war variety) could be run in. I think there would be a lot of interesting things that could be learned [1] about human nature, which could possibly be used to develop theories about broad, general polarization, and perhaps some ideas to improve the situation.

> Polarisation is a fight. "Doing something" is likely to get increasingly ugly before it gets better.

As far as I can tell, not a single major site is trying anything to study or improve the situation, beyond censorship and throttling of those who hold inappropriate opinions. It would be nice if HN would at least consider consider being an exception to this culture of apathy, and try to find a way to use its great power in service of the world.

> But for most websites and news organizations, polarisation is profit. Oddly not for HN, which is aggressively moderated instead.

True. But then, I am of the opinion that bias can be detected in the moderation here, which is simple, essentially unavoidable human nature.

EDIT:

Like for example, wouldn't it be extremely interesting to know what the person was thinking when they downvoted this comment?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23167910

Oh sure, "it's just human nature", but that's an incredibly vague and useless way to view the world. My wild guess is that there is at least some aspect of tribal culture behind such behavior, a kind of heuristic like "this person is not one of us"...which is technically quite true probably. The voting history table in the HN database holds all sorts of undiscovered secrets about human nature (upon which most of the problems of the day rest, on a root cause basis)...if only we were willing to look.

EDIT 2: A few interesting optional features that I would make available in this special mode....

- make a (categorized) reason for downvoting (maybe also upvoting) mandatory, with support for an optional/mandatory tweet-length textual reason

- hide usernames of comments, either for the entire time, or for a configurable length of time (and then, observe voting patters before and after the anonymity is lifted)

- compare voting behavior of similar topics when running in normal mode vs special mode...might (is it possible, or not) people put a bit more thought into actually thinking about why it is they are voting a particular way, and perhaps reconsider their instinctual decision? This is a fairly foundational idea in the practice of mindfulness, something that the world doesn't seem to excel at, particularly in the last 5 years.

See:

https://showcase.metamate.io/hackernews-trends for search terms like 'polarization', 'climate change', 'nationalism', and all the other obvious topics.

https://www.google.com/search?q=political+polarization

https://www.google.com/search?q=climate+change

https://www.google.com/search?q=nationalism

https://www.google.com/search?q=racism

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=politica...

There is so much truth at our fingertips, if we'd be willing to move beyond finger pointing and expecting "someone else" to solve the problem. It's like that sign you sometimes see in the kitchen area at offices: "Please clean up after yourself, your mother doesn't work here." I think that general idea is fairly applicable to the planet as well, but seeing things from that perspective seems to be "rather unpopular" these days.