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Comment by splawn | Hacker News Reader

I bet whoever has the top comment on this one is going to see their karma go up and down as everyone tests out the unvote and undown feature. :)

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Tested upvote, worked.

Tested undo upvote, worked.

Tested downvote, worked.

My testing is complete.

I went for iterations - up, down, up, down, up, down. So it seems to track. I left an upvote to make sure it stuck when I come back in a few hours to revisit.

Now put that in a loop to see if they have any memory leaks :)

You are on some kind of genius crowd sourced testing thing, you should start a SaaS!

nice username, i love memes too!

So was the final state of your vote down or did you change it afterwards? Did you test attempting to upvote twice in a row, downvote twice in a row, etc? :)

new user so pardon my ignorance but I dont have a downvote button. Do I need to enable it somewhere?

you need to have a certain amount of karma (number next to your account) for the downvote function to be available.

A few weeks ago I recently obtained the downvote ability at 500 karma.

I suspect you mean 501. I reached 500 a few weeks ago, and left it there for a while... it was such a nice, round number.

Sorry upvoted you, onwards to the next round number.

^ This is correct. I was equally confused when mine hit 500 and downvote wasn't there.

Presumably somewhere in the HN code you would find `karma > KARMA_THRESHOLD_DOWNVOTE`.

More likely (> karma downvote-threshold) since news.arc is written in, well, arc.

Sure. I should have disclaimed my pseudo-code I guess. Point was just that I expect there's a > and a 500, as opposed to a 501.

Good guess: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7606467.

Can I suggest 512 for an even nicer round number.

What did you do to get to 500? I am still at 84 and feels like it will be forever.

You need to have a certain amount of karma before you can downvote comments. I'm not sure what the threshold is these days.

You get it after 500

You need a certain amount of karma to downvote. I think it's 500, but I'm not sure because I don't have that much yet. :)

Edit: it's confirmed at 501: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12074198

Just 5400 more days and I'll be able to downvote! What a time to be alive!

I just upvoted you there because I'm nice like that.

Thanks! Only three more votes before I get superpowers. :)

I upvoted you. With great power comes yadda yadda yadda.

Edited to add: PSYCH!! Now it's going to take 4 upvotes to get super powers. BWAHAHAHA!!

Edited to add #2: Just kidding! You're 2 upvotes away again!

P.S. Dear friends, I'm sorry. I won't abuse my vast and terrible ability to grant or deny imaginary Internet points ever again. -xf

That's not how karma trains work!!

With imaginary power comes imaginary responsibility, and don't you forget it!

Just upvoted you twice and it seems you're now past the 501 mark! Welcome to voting land :P

Upvoted to join the upvote train.

I was confused as to why I have a downvote button now, I just realized I barely passed 500 few days ago, woo.

And down vote arrows do not appear on aging posts.

There is a karma limit (of ~500) to get downvote privileges.

No, you generally don't get to downvote in HN until your karma is above some threshold that changes occasionally.

You need a certain Troll Level.

There is a bug after you undo your vote for the 500th time :)

I followed your testing instructions on your comment. Test passed.

You can downvote?? Are you a wizard?

when does one get down vote power? edit: never mind i read below.

I can repro this. Thank you for the instructions.

Finally! I tested on you :) The upvote is awesome, there have many times over the years I've mistakingly hit the up/down and wished for a redo.

I wanted to upvote that comment and so I did!

Then later I changed my mind because really, it deserved a downvote.

Anger passed and facing the consequences of my actions I was nothing but a broken man. I brought back equilibrium and removed that downvote.

This is when I realized that the timing was perfect for a self-centered comment.

This comment made me want to test the reply. When there is a mighty wind, two cheeks are funnier than one.

I tested it on you, and left the upvote. :)

I'm having fun refreshing your profile page and watching your karma jump around.

Wow that is quite impressive jumping. Sometimes I forget how many people lurk on HN.

Same lol.

1314, 1313, 1311, 1314....

GP's karma is in the 1500's now. Wow that's a great comment.

When it settles down you have to tell us how many upvotes you ended up with on this. I tested back and forth several times and left you with an upvote. Your karma was about 200 less last time I checked!

I can't downvote. How much Karma do I need to activate it?

I got my downvote ability at around 550 or so...

For me it was 500.

I'm not sure the number is constant. I think it scales with either the age or the prominence of the comment. I've seen threads where I was unable to downvote top tier comments, even though I could downvote their children.

It's constant at 501.

I did see interesting behavior when I crossed the threshold: I couldn't downvote comments that existed before I reached that karma level (or at least the UI didn't render them with a down vote button).

Downvoting wouldn't be affected by that per se, but downvote arrows last for a much briefer time window than upvote arrows do.

I think after 8 hours you can't downvote a comment anymore.

Are you sure you do not suffer from a mitm?

500 AFAIK

I have 117 and can downvote.

Are you certain? Maybe you are thinking of the 'collapse' button, which is represented by a minus sign?

Yep, although it is not near the upvote button and sits among such links as parent and flag.

400 or 500 points, I forgot which. Maybe someone with something between those two can tell?

Don't know for sure but empirically it's more than 450.

I'm at 495 and can't downvote.

Quick, 5 people upvote me and I'll tell you if it kicks in.

OK, at exactly 501 you get a little down arrow (doesn't appear at 500).

dang already confirmed it below, but at least I got to feel like a camgirl for 5 minutes.

Thanks for playing!

We can all dream

Would you like to know whether you lose your downvoting ability if your karma drops below 500 again? Just ask, and I'm sure the HN crowd is willing to help you find out :-)

Also, would that freeze the downvotes you gave earlier, or would you still be able to undo them?

Voted up. Saw the "unvote", didn't click it. I believe Hacker News has tested the functionality. I'll leave the upvote. Here's to you splawn.

I failed unvote by tapping on collapse link

Haha, looking at your profile page, your comment karma is increasing at about 20 upvotes / min

A pessimist would see their karma go down, then back up -- maybe.

I actually did that before reading this comment. :)

I think we really just need to test that down-voting works. But I almost never use down-votes so I'll leave that up to the "crowd".

It's you :-)

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