HN Downvoting System

This is one of the flaws of the upvote/downvote system, it can give people a bit of a mob mentality where making a comment or opinion disappear is as easy as a click (and anonymously too).Maybe downvotes could cost the voter karma, or have a higher bar for who can downvote.

The strong tendency to downvote ad-hominen / abusive comments on HN has really improved my ability to write comments that are informative and non-inflammatory. That's the good news.The bad news is that the comments that I make that get lots of votes tend to be on bike-shedding topics - things that everyone has an opinion on, such as sexual harrassment in the community, or military toys, or HN meta-discussions. Posts that I consider authoritive (and there are _some_ subjects on which

True. The reason is that voting and downvoting semantic is perceived differently, and people’s ego. The easiest, although imperfect, solution I think would be that downvoting costs you some karma (both the downvotee and the downvoter).

Almost anyone with a logged in account can upvote comments. There is a karma threshold to downvoting. Thus, an unfairly downvoted post is not a failure of the downvote system but a failure of everyone else to provide corrective upvotes.

Attempt to be helpful by posting the relevant quote formatted as code with horizontal scrolling: 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

Drive-by downvoting of quality or interesting comments usually are offset by upvotes in any marginally popular post. Don't worry about it. Points here mean much less than they do on sites like Stack Overflow and Reddit.

You need to ween yourself off your social proof addiction. The problem with vote counts is that two downvotes can start a cascade of reflex downvotes. Or at best, it won't get upvoted. When vote counts where active, this effect caused many instances where an excellent comment was found greyed out at the bottom of the page until a few smart HN folks with high karma voted it back up.

The problem with HN is that it shows comment rating as MAX(-4,commentRating). Some people are not aware of this and downvote the comment further, thinking that -4 is not good enough punishment for it. If they saw that the abusing comment had already accumulated 40 downvotes, maybe they wouldn't bury it further.

What happens when x people downvote the same comment? You have a string of at least x replies that would likely be useless ("lame", "troll", etc.) Then someone would be inclined to downvote those comments, etc.The majority of my karma has come from comments instead of submissions. One of my recent higher ranking comments ended up with 91 upvotes, but I know from watching the thread that probably 2 or 3 people downvoted the comment. In the end, why does it really matter? There are enough

So many posts sit on the front page with many upvotes and zero comments.There's a weird mechanism that punishes posts with comments, because they are deemed "controversial".Regarding downvoting - just disable it. What makes the echo chamber even worse is that only users with a certain amount of points are able to downvote. So people who have already avoided being downvoted by others get to effectively police who else amasses the required number of points to be