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Comment by whybroke | Hacker News Reader

Downvoting currently sure is broken. An hour ago, when daring to suggest the Russians might actually be responsible for the DNC hacks, everything I've posted for the last week silently earned a down vote.

And while I don't particularly care since this is junk account and its not my website, I imagine it could be interesting to someone.

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Seems like it would be easy enough to disable voting on comments that are a few days old, or on stories that are no longer being visited.

I would suggest disabling voting from profile comment pages, to avoid voting on comments without reading their context, but this is Hacker News, and it would be trivial to script that...

I don't think whybroke was being entirely truthful. Downvoting is already disabled for comments older than a day.

Preventing upvoting of old comments would kind of suck, sometimes you only see really great comments years after they were posted.

Perhaps so, I did not screenshot the posts of the last week. Certainly scores that were very positive yesterday are now negative. And certainly it began immediately after a post to wikipedia's marginal utility page which apparently disturbed someone's ideology. And it seems to have been aggravated further by this[1] post.

But perhaps this is desired result. Either way the issue is no longer interesting to me.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12664519

Not sure about what you're saying about last week's comments but I have experienced a day or so after a less popular comment I receive downvotes on other comments after that for what I consider less controversial comments. Could be selection bias. What I usually see though is that upvotes and downvotes tend to average to where they would have been otherwise even in those cases overtime. I just miss out on extra karma I suppose :)

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