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Yes, there’s a lot more upside to comments as a result.

Generally voting signal to noise ratio goes: upvote, no-vote, downvote — allowing more downvote would most like have more negative than positive impact on the community.

Is that a recent change? I'm pretty sure some of my less popular remarks earned double digit negative points.

No, that's been around forever.

Back when comment scores were public via the API, I retrieved the lowest-rating comments for each month. which was always -4: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IfbSDYVBXiHZCuMdHXgp...

Bonus histogram of comment scores calculated in 2014: https://minimaxir.com/img/hn-comments/distribution_comment_p...

It's always been -4 for me. At times it's felt like more when I've doubled down on my unpopular comments with more downvoted comments (and because usually every down vote hurts).

I think the limit probably discourages long winded "all these downvotes are a badge of honor" comments. People who crave downvotes only get four. People hurt by downvotes only get four, too.

Greying out goes with downvotes and send to go in more steps than just 4 ... guess I should RTFGAP.