Why can hackernews submissions not be downvoted? | Hacker News Reader

Why can hackernews submissions not be downvoted?

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The Hacker News welcome message

http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

gives an overview of the community experiment here, summarizing the site guidelines.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The Hacker News FAQ

http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

gives some additional details about how Hacker News is administered. The welcome message distills the basic rules into a simple statement: "Essentially there are two rules here: don't post or upvote crap links, and don't be rude or dumb in comment threads."

I should note that previously expressed community consensus, in a thread someone opened about what kinds of submissions to upvote and what kinds to NOT upvote, revealed that most of the long-time posters here with high karma STRONGLY disfavor links about electoral politics (of any country) or basically political issues (as contrasted with scientific or economic issues). Since I read that thread, I have had a strong tendency to flag as off-topic any new submissions that seem to be mostly about politics rather than submissions that gratify "one's intellectual curiosity" in the sense intended in the site guidelines.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

From the FAQ (A good idea to read the FAQ first) Althought it's not really a full 'why'.

"Why don't I see down arrows?

There are no down arrows on submissions. They only appear on comments after users reach a certain karma threshold."

Although really, what would the point be of downvoting a submission? The most popular ones will still reach the top. I guess it just means that popular posts that cause a lot of division of opinion are able to reach the top. So something about Abortion that may normally be voted for neutrally (not saying it would, just an example), and is of a good quality can get to the top of the main feed.

Guess I missed that in the FAQ - but it's still a little bizarre. It's a fundamental failing (I think) in the majority of social networks (facebook likes, g+ +1s, twitter RTs, etc) - once something hits a certain level of "popularity", it can't become "unpopular"

Think of it like all the posts are downvoted by default.

I think it's more that they all start neutral and can only go up - that is a very different case than being able to drop

Once you have 500+ karma you can downvote comments.

I guess that is akin to needing 125 rep on the SE sites to downvote (though voting buttons are visible prior to having the ability to do so)

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