See some of you on the other side but it won’t be here. I’m out.

It's what's happened across Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook over the past decade. You've all built platforms intended for social discourse but instead built extremely brittle systems subject to gamified manipulation by showing people which opinions reward and punish them. And those are then manipulated at-large by outside groups responsible for elevating a particular way of thinking about a given topic.

Conversations do not need a algorithmic popularity mechanism.

I agree, but that's unfortunately a very low bar these days.

If we got rid of upvotes/downvotes (keep flagging privileges, but make it public record, and abuse-it-you-lose-it) the variety of thought and ideas on HN would 100x overnight.

No they don't? They a take an oath to the constitution. "I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic"

The president is temporary. The constitution endures.

Also due to the upvote/downvote/flag system, entire narratives are controlled with a small number of accounts. It's a fundamentally broken approach to online discussions. We need to get rid of upvote/downvotes completely. Retain flagging for vetted users, and punish those who are flagging material that should not be flagged.

1) Remove upvotes/downvotes entirely. It does nothing for discussion except create groupthink and open itself to manipulation by unscrupulous actors.

2) Retain flagging access by long-time contributing accounts, but if you're found to flag something in bad faith, those privileges are revoked.

3) Flagging itself needs to be a public record so we can see exactly which accounts are doing so.