Link-bait Hacker Slash News Dot Considered Cancerous Request For Call To Action(hanselman.com)

   You may be familiar with social news sites like Hacker News and Reddit. Users can vote for stories they like, comment on those stories, and more crucially, vote for and against each others comments. Voting on comments is a highly imperfect way to shape discourse, mostly because there are two conflicting goals: The first is to moderate discussion and the second is to argue the topic at hand. Ideally, if you don't agree with someone you reply to their comment with a counter-argument disputing their point, and you down vote comments that need moderation, such as comments that are off-topic or comments that descend into Ad Hominem Abuse ("U R Fag"). In practice, users tend to down vote comments to punish each other, and people being people, disagreement ends up being "punished" with down votes. This is widely accepted as harmful, but difficult to stop.