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Comment by vlunkr | Hacker News Reader

Getting downvoted is not at all the same as having comments deleted, or getting banned, which is incredibly common on some subreddits.

Also not giving new users access to downvotes hopefully means that those downvoting are somewhat good citizens.

View on HN

Lets not kid ourselves, the main reason HN is much higher quality than Reddit is because of the users. It could all change tomorrow if they find out about us.

People forget that Reddit used to look a lot like HN does today in like 2006-10 before the Digg exodus. Today Reddit is almost entirely kids.

Also the quantity of users and comments. You can still see comments that have been downvoted by scrolling a bit. On Reddit, unpopular comments will be buried and require extra clicks to access.

The downvote (for me) is too ambiguous. Without a couple words specifically about why, it often (to me) comes off as, "I didn't like what you said, I'm too lazy to reply, so I'll down vote you." It's hard to take DV'ing seriously when there's zero context. How many times have we read a sub-comment similar to, "I'm not sure why you're being downvoted..." Nuff said.

Frankly, I can't be bothered to downvote. I've seen plenty of questionable things, and I just keep scrolling. I'd rather save my energy for upvotes. I'd rather focus on the positive. Let someone else play HN Police if that fulfills some kinky need they have.

I miss the days when people would almost always leave a comment when downvoting. That was back before you could "undown" a fat-finger downvote.

IMO downvoting is useful for comments that don't warrant a reply, or where replying would only encourage more bad behavior.

Right. When it's so painfully obvious. So then why bother? What's the objective at that point?

I agree it's not the same as mods literally removing content or banning users but it still yields the same result. People observe what type of thought gets upvotes and repeat those views/opinions over and over. This of course is exactly how reddit works too outside of mods.

> hopefully means that those downvoting are somewhat good citizens.

Definitely not. It only takes a few flags on HN to completely remove something from the front-page. It only takes a few downvotes to grey it nothingness.

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