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Comment by nothrabannosir | Hacker News Reader

a karma threshold. 800 or something?

500, I only just gained downvote ability in the past few weeks, when I finally gained more than 500.

Edit: another thing I should have mentioned is that it seemed to me that only those comments made after I gained this ability were downvotable, the thread my last few comments were in was sprinkled with downvotable comments, which were newer, and non-downvotable comments which were there before mine. I might have been imagining this or be mistaken though.

As a data point, I am at _exactly_ 500 right now, and cannot downvote. So perhaps you have to exceed 500?

EDIT: checking again at 507 and I now have the power to downvote. So there's our answer (plus my moderately shameless play for some upvotes worked).

Yup. 501. Remember. With great power comes great responsibility.

Indeed - compared with the ability to speak freely, the ability to downvote is not much of a privilege.

Council of 300

https://xkcd.com/1224/

the real question is if it goes away if you're downvoted.

I believe it does, but don't have any evidence to back it up. If itp volunteers, we could test by down voting his comments :)

Exactly... This effect might reinforce 'upvote'-grabbing behavior, to either not lose the ability, or regain downvote if lost.

Upvote-grabbing behavior is already rampant here, just as with any forum with point tallies attached to comments. Proof: all of the "edit: why the downvotes?" comments.

it seemed to me that only those comments made after I gained this ability were downvotable

I think you might be mistaken. You might not have noticed yet that the downvote option disappears on its own a set time (24 hours, I think) after the comment was made. Perhaps it was only the comments older than this threshold that were non-votable?

That's quite possible. I had not realized that the downvote option disappeared so quickly.

I think my karma accrued overnight, so when I noticed I'd exceeded the threshold a lot of the thread was perhaps a day old. The only thing I am relatively certain of is that some of the older comments in the thread were not downvotable, and the newer ones were.

only those comments made after I gained this ability were downvotable

That would be quite computationally intensive to implement.

Not if you store the timestamp of when you gain downvote rights, and compare against that.

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