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Comment by 37 | Hacker News Reader

Oh okay. At the rate I'm going I will be able to downvote after about 57 years. Hmm...

For what its worth, karma is gained not only by discussion but also by article submission. If you found 1 article per day that evokes curious and thought provoking discussion then you would be well above the threshold in no time.

Hint: anything with Rust in the title is upvoted regardless of the (lack of) content, if it stay positive towards the language.

I know this is tongue in cheek, but really I could never do that kinda thing. Feels like I would be watering down the quality content that I see here every day. (also: I know nothing about Rust, never click on those discussions)

Honest question: If in over 10 years you've contributed to discussions so infrequently that you've barely accumulated 100 karma - including this post that accounts for a third or more of your karma now - and (as you said in another thread) you think you would only downvote a max of 3 times per year...

Why do you want it?

Just yesterday someone called me "little shit" on here and I have no recourse. I'd like to be able to report that to the admins, but apparently the admins are OK with this type of behavior on here.

You can't downvote replies to you.

I'm aware. Notice I didn't ask to downvote, but to report to the admins.

What on earth makes you say that the admins are OK with that? It's obviously against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You can report comments by flagging them or in egregious cases by emailing hn@ycombinator.com.

I don't have the right to flag comments.

Are you sure? Click on the time on the comment, then you get a detailed view of that comment -- I think you should see the "flag" button there (a bit of a round route, for sure).

Everyone with karma > 30 has the right to flag comments. jjgreen is correct. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cflag.

Thanks for the honest question!

>including this post that accounts for a third or more of your karma now

(Holy crow! Thank you everyone!)

Clearly I don't care that much, which is why it took me 10 years to ask the question... I know it's just internet points, etc etc. I guess when I see someone saying something that I absolutely know is objectively wrong, I would like to show my disapproval without sitting down and actually fleshing out a response. I'm not the best at putting my thoughts into keystrokes (this little response took me a good 30 minutes to write).

Also (sidenote) I don't love how I had to scroll through a bunch of comments to find this response, or even to know that you responded to me. I wish there was some "notification" or something that let me know that you cared enough to take the time to reply to my comment.

> I would like to show my disapproval without sitting down and actually fleshing out a response.

I think this is exactly the reason why there is a limit. That downvote wouldn't contribute to the discussion whereas your fleshed out response would.

Also, if I recall correctly, when you downvote you're supposed to explain why.

And ofc up and down votes should indicate contributions to discussion. Meaning that if something is incorrect or you don't agree with it, doesn't necessarily mean that it should be downvoted.

> I guess when I see someone saying something that I absolutely know is objectively wrong, I would like to show my disapproval without sitting down and actually fleshing out a response.

I mean no disrespect in this follow-up question, but given how little you've participated in this community's discourse, do you still feel like you've earned that anonymous and concrete voice of disapproval?

I mean "concrete" here in that a downvote can actually help bury/remove a comment, and so you have actual power to influence this community when you have that ability.

Edit: to your "note" about finding replies, if go to your profile, you can view a list of all your comments, along with replies to them. It's not great but it's easier than scrolling a whole comments section.

You can also use something like "HN Enhancement Suite", a browser plugin that improves the overall UI of Hacker News (although I think you said you mostly browse on a phone so that won't help you there).

Probably the best (only?) option for reply notification is that there's an RSS feed of all replies to a user, like this:

https://hnrss.org/replies?id=37

I’m pretty sure the ratio of lurkers and posters on HN is not as even as other social media platforms’.

I'd love to see those stats!

I think the conventionally accepted stats for mainstream social media is that 10% of the users account for 80% of the content, or something similar to that?

I don't know if HN has ever published these kinds of stats but it would be interesting to see.

Been here 12.5 years and have 439 points. So I'm _almost_ there :)

Keep it up phaylon! +1 internet points to you!

You can get a decent amount of upvotes if you comment with a summary or include the best quotes from the linked article.

It can be part of your new year's resolutions. Downvote at least one person you disagree with before the year's over.

I don’t downvote very often and I don’t do it simply because I disagree with someone.

People downvoting for simple disagreements will create groupthink, and we loose the opportunity for having interesting discussions.

I meant it as a joke, but indicating it's a joke ruins it.

I suspect most downvotes come from disagreements, but there is no way to verify that.

For the record, I interpreted it as a joke, but also somewhat of a inspirational challenge. But I don't care enough about downvotes to try that hard, so yeah. Also dang says it's never been against the rules to downvote because of disagreement.[0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29772167

I know Paul Graham explicitly said it's ok to downvote for disagreeing (I read it a few weeks ago, I cannot provide a source), but it's not like his words are religious scriptures haha.

There's no real point in having rules you can't enforce anyway. If you wanted to stop that you would have to get rid of downvotes alltogether.

I used to think downvotes were a good thing and I wished some other forums had them, but HNs downvote system changed my mind. I wonder if that would increase the load on the mods because then people would use flagging for that? I don't know. It's not my forum, I don't have access to the statistics and I don't get a say anyway!

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