I’ll try to condense it more. If you play a video game and a modal pops up, it takes you out of the experience. It’s the same as (hypothetically) me having to go into my HN profile to find a list of comments I upvoted to then go ahead and downvote (versus just having the downvote button next to the post).

Can’t teach this stuff, you basically need to be confronted by tons of bad UI in software, games, physical printed forms, processes, until you get a good sense of taste.

I can’t teach HN devs that my thumb covers both the upvote and downvote button on mobile. Can’t teach it.