There is no shortage of karma-free forums elsewhere full of flames and junk. The karma system is helpful in providing feedback to people with a lack of impulse control or respects for others. If you're repeatedly banned, you may want to examine how you communicate as doing so would probably increase your ability to affect change.

I said I liked being banned. Why would I want to change something I like? It's a reminder to avoid getting into arguments with people who pay no attention to logic and have weird, arbitrary loyalties to systems which present no actual usefulness.

Yeah, exactly. It's a dysfunctional pattern. I enjoy it, but I really think there's a systemic tendency to dysfunctional patterns here. That's inevitable with any social software, so you have to plan for your dysfunctions. Look at Stack Overflow, the dysfunction they get is karma whores answering as many questions as possible, and competing to be first with the answer. That's a pretty great dysfunction. The dysfunction we have here is anybody who polarizes opinions gets banned. The cynical (me) find it amusing and the sensitive (Giraffes) get their feelings hurt. Either way, it's bad. You don't want a community which punishes anyone for voicing controversial opinions, but that's inherent to the design here.

I think it's more the the way that opinions are expressed than the opinions themselves which creates blowback (unless one is expressing something truly polarizing, like singing the praises of racial hierarchy). So, if you pay attention to the tone of communication you can express controversial opinions without defensive blowback and have a higher chance of people understanding your ideas.

you're making the same assumption I disagreed with two comments ago. to me, getting banned is not the negative part of the experience. the negative part of the experience is the bad habit of coming back to engage in more fruitless conversation when I could be off doing stuff. the more offensive my tone is on this site, the sooner I'll get banned again, the quicker I'll get on with something actually useful to do, and the better it'll be for me.

I should just follow my own advice and devolve into Tourette's syndrome. fuck you, you chinchilla rapist. (nothing personal.)

anyway, ALSO, none of this has anything to do with what I'm talking about, which is that HN's karma system incubates various dysfunctions, and that anyone who sets up any kind of points system on a social site is going to be setting up the rules of a game that people will then play and be emotionally invested in winning.

curious game, the only way to win is not to play. I'm going to throw away my password to this account, log out, and see how long I can last before starting account #4.

I assumed that being banned wouldn't be a positive experience if not being banned was more of a positive experience, i.e. if you got more value from communication.

But yeah, communication is often minimally useful. And I get that the pollution of motivation caused by social app incentives make make it even less so. It seems that without these incentives things tend to fall down in different ways, but maybe my experience of qualities communities that don't rely on social app incentives is limited.

[And chincilla is mischaracterizing what happened between us: it was my understanding that it was consensual.]

PPS, nothing against you, giraffes guy, I just re-read my sentence and it seemed a bit harsh.

I'm just saying that a web site that makes a person unhappy is not a good thing for them to be part of, and as someone who comes back repeatedly, despite being banned, to me it looks as if your desire to come back, despite being disenfranchised, is a sure sign of dysfunction. my coming back is certainly dysfunctional, but here I am. people dig the site in spite of its dysfunctions, but it sure would be cool if PG et al just threw the dysfunctional parts away.