HN comments more than a day old cannot be downvoted

2 points·joeyh··3 comments

Looks like this is a recent change. I'd be curious what bad behavior it prevents. I first saw it in the context of the massive spotify thread, and it seemed very surprising that some comments could be up/downvoted, and others only upvoted.

Screenshot: http://kitenet.net/~joey/tmp/only_upvote_some.png

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Yeah, it's not that recent. I think it's to prevent people who, seeing a person make one bad comment, go and vote down a bunch of that person's old posts, just out of spite.

Curious - why would you want to downvote a comment? Was it offensive or wildly off topic?

Most likely the comment had reached it's floor (-10 is it)?

<edit>I took a look. I see that the comment was in fact informative - even if the message is very worrying for anyone who might want to use spotify</edit>

I used to be that worried about things on HN. I'm not anymore and I think the best way to get to that point is to periodically kill off your user by changing the password to gobbledegook and then creating a new user the next time you want to post (and not doing this too often if you want to participate because you have to hurdle a few points after user recreation).

All of this is temporary, and downvoting imo is going to cause more anger than it does promote the reasons for HN existing.

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