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I agree with you that the downvoting is a meritocracy, but that's my point. A user has to earn the right to use that particular function. The difference in learning how a piece of functionality is used and why or in when it should be used is two sides of the same coin.

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A user has to earn the right to use that particular function

Not to detract from the discussion, but this isn't an actual feature on YC. AFAIK, nobody can down-vote (although editors can [dead]).

You have to reach a certain karma score to be able to downvote individual comments. I can't remember what the score is, but its fairly low.

50 or so in my case. But the person who thinks the feature doesn't exist has a karma of 2053. Maybe it's not conditioned just on karma?

no, it's that you're talking about two different things.

you can downvote comments once your karma goes over a certain score. but nobody can downvote submissions. no doubt that's what andreyf was talking about.

also, the karma numbers keep changing, which is why nobody seems to know for sure where the thresholds are. back when i got the right to downvote comments, you only needed about 20 points.

Thanks for the clarification!

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