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Comment by war1025 | Hacker News Reader

I read somewhere that downvotes are capped to -4 and it made me much less likely to self-censor when I felt like I had a valid point.

I know that the people who disagree with me outnumber those that agree, but the way that the upvotes bounce up and down tells me there are more people out there that agree with me than I would have assumed.

(Plus I think I've only made it down to -4 once or twice)

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There have been many times when I wanted to use my upvoting ability to unhide a comment that has some merit. To that end, I wish I could see the precise score of downvoted comments. (IIRC, a net score of -1 prevents a majority of HN readers from seeing the comment.)

? -1 score greys out a comment, nothing more

Hmm, I seem to recall comments being entirely suppressed from view on reaching some threshold, thought it was -1...

Definitely not. The only comments that are hidden by default are the [dead] ones, and anyone can see them by turning 'showdead' on in their profile. Outright deletion is possible, but only for a few hours, or if the author specifically asks us to later. There have been a handful of exceptions in obscure cases over the years, mostly for legal reasons.

Btw, for anyone who has trouble reading a faded comment, you can click on its timestamp to go to its page and the text should be readable.

you see how much discussion is happening under a 0-point parent?

I've seen some. Usually when the non-positive post is something substantive as opposed to a hot take.

Unfortunately you still get the [flag] abuse. It seems that some members are able to flag posts and you can often find if you say something disagreeable in a thread that every single one of your comments will get flagged regardless of the content of the comment in question. The comments can be well-written, non-confrontational and be a genuine attempt to start a discussion, but they'll get flagged because someone doesn't like what you wrote but (presumably) can't form an argument against it (like Paul Graham said, people only really hate things that could be true).

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