As things function now, downvotes are for all intents and purposes anonymous.
It's perfectly fine to disagree with this belief; HN itself does!
[Edited]
For one thing you're not really 'censoring' anything but even if we say, for the sake of argument, that you are why should it have some cost different than the cost of 'promoting' something when you upvote? The mods' argument that meta is bad for actual conversation is also quite compelling. What's the counter to that other than stuff that mostly seems to boil down to some version of 'getting downvotes kind of feels bad' (of which calling downvotes 'censoring' seems like a particularly overwrought variant).
>why should it have some cost different than the cost of 'promoting' something when you upvote
If this is a blocker, show both! My recommendation to add the tiniest bit of friction only to the anonymous negative was an attempt to reflect existing site guidelines. My apologies if terminology is a distraction; I did add "censuring" as a better word.
>mods' argument that meta is bad for actual conversation
Up/down votes are currently only public on the receiver's side, and this meta gamification powers HN. Would revealing the other side of the equation deter abuse of anonymous control (with an acceptable level of side effects)? All I can answer for sure is that intervention for downvote abuse (if any) is behind-the-scenes for now.
[I assume] the pool of eligible downvoters continues to grow; maybe when the time comes the next step will be another moderator rather than crowdsourcing -- the precedent of hiding individual comment scores seems relevant.
Would be an interesting research to conduct if randomness can help based on say user karma. For cryto and security we know there are certain users seen as “goto”, so their opinions weigh much more and might end up being the top all the time. I’d like to see some “penalty” by promoting the less-popular users (not comment).
The point is treat tge display not entirely based on number of upvotes the entire time.
[1]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251610/why-does-dow...
[2]: https://disqus.com/home/discussion/supportqa/why_was_the_dow...
But the Disagree vote isn't a downvote — it doesn't affect karma or sort order. It justs shows how many people disagree about something. That can be good to know, so one can avoid harmful advice. Or just because one is curious about others' opinions.
There is a downvote too, actually, but only available for staff and core members. It works a bit like the downvote here at HN (e.g. removes "karma" and moves the comment downwards, dims it a bit).
Here's how the disagree vote looks: https://www.talkyard.io/please-note-2
No need to make it visible why a user's karma is dropping, it just is. Could be they're getting downvoted, or they're using their voting action and reducing it themselves.
The only other option that works well is a meta-moderation feature like /. has, but that's impractical for this site, the way it does things.
I doubt that really happens, other than for that very brief moment and tiny minority of users who are right around the threshold. The karma losses are capped, it's hard to lose meaningful amounts of karma without actively trying to.
So we're both at 1000 karma, I downvote you. You go to 999, I go to 999.5. Repeat. If I'm only downvoting, I'm forfeiting my karma to that moderation action. Optionally the same for flagging and other things.
This becomes a constraint because a user who just got to 500 karma and downvotes would lose the privilege immediately. A user at 10k karma can downvote pretty much everything. You could also have it cost more to downvote more in a period of time. Like 0 karma to downvote once an hour. 0.5 karma for two or three times an hour. 1 karma for four times an hour. Some scale (linear or faster).
This would prevent or mitigate people going through and downvoting all of a particular commenters posts in a thread just because it's controversial or they wrote one controversial thing. It creates a cost for moderation.
On HN, this would also favour commenting participation over curating participation. It's not obvious this is a win over the way things work now.
One of the biggest questions I have: are downvotes an accurate way to moderate low-quality comments? I'm not sure how that can be proved by data but it would be interesting to see someone prove it.