Thanks for taking the time to bring up these counterpoints!
>why should it have some cost different than the cost of 'promoting' something when you upvote
If this is a blocker, show both! My recommendation to add the tiniest bit of friction only to the anonymous negative was an attempt to reflect existing site guidelines. My apologies if terminology is a distraction; I did add "censuring" as a better word.
>mods' argument that meta is bad for actual conversation
Up/down votes are currently only public on the receiver's side, and this meta gamification powers HN. Would revealing the other side of the equation deter abuse of anonymous control (with an acceptable level of side effects)? All I can answer for sure is that intervention for downvote abuse (if any) is behind-the-scenes for now.
[I assume] the pool of eligible downvoters continues to grow; maybe when the time comes the next step will be another moderator rather than crowdsourcing -- the precedent of hiding individual comment scores seems relevant.
My intention is to ensure contributing to publicly censoring/censuring costs something (intentionally tiny, but greater than zero/nothing) each time, beyond the one-time minimum karma requirement. "Downvote to disagree" seems unlikely to scale indefinitely, particularly as mobile means less willingness to contribute beyond clicking up/down (specifically now that there are apps catching on that remove all "fat-fingered web UI" friction!).
It's perfectly fine to disagree with this belief; HN itself does!
My latest campaign has been to find a way to add the tiniest bit of accountability for downvotes. I believe at a minimum the total number of downvotes given should be shown publicly on user profiles.
As things function now, downvotes are for all intents and purposes anonymous.
In my ignorance I'm not really aware of the landscape for these types of technologies; does anyone have time to share a brief summary or link to further info?
Interesting to consider WebTorrent vs. BitTorrent in this context; BitTorrent has grown much closer to mainstream but WebTorrent doesn't seem to be growing.
Build an app graphic designers can whitelabel to sell photo "templates", ala InstaMag. I know someone selling Photoshop templates on Etsy looking for this.
>foreverbanned: They didn't mentioned the filename at first. What they actually said was: "And a Basecamp user uploaded the 100,000,000th file (It was a picture of a cat!)"
src: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16419628#16420689