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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Downvotes are imperfect but HN would be worse without them. However, I don't think that has anything to do with your breaking the rule about incivility. Being downvoted, even being downvoted unfairly, is no excuse. Please only post civil comments from now on.

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I am sure that you cannot back with any credible evidence the assumption than downvoting comments makes HN a better place. You can add flagging and that will do better, but downvoting is unhealthy. The fixed -4 threshold is random and wrong as well. The loyalty to Paul Graham's original decisions is misunderstood loyalty and there are a lot of missed opportunities here, because of these repeated mistakes.

I'm curious, did you know you were taking to a moderator? (dang is on the HN staff: http://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over-hack... )

I'm asking because I'm wondering if it should be made more obvious that he is when he is posting in his moderation role.

Yes, I know who he is. Although I had a much older account, which password I couldn't recover, because it's from the days when no email was necessary here, I frequent HN for years and that's why I care about this community as I spend a significant portion of my life in here.

We can sometimes help people regain old accounts with no email address in them. If you still want it, you're welcome to email us (hn@ycombinator.com) with the username and we'll look into it.

Going off on perennial questions of forum design is not a good way to deal with the issue here.

When people can't or won't be civil on HN, we ban their accounts. There's no exception for getting downvoted—on the contrary.

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