HN Suggestion: Comments automatically upvote

Since we expect people to comment in order to add to discussion, it seems that any comment should be counted as an upvote of the parent comment/article/both.

This has two benefits:

  1. Saves users a click when commenting
  2. Discourages people from commenting that they don't like something

Downside is you can no longer give a comment and a downvote, and so cannot explain downvotes, unless you downvote first, then comment (not too hard to remember.)

This also raises the question to me: What's downvoting for? Since something sitting at 1 is unlikely to be seen anyway, and flag exists for pointless posts, it basically exists so the community can fight about what it is interested in, with faction A voting up and faction B voting down. Is that worthwhile?

Perhaps PG can tell us: how many downvotes are there in proportion to upvotes? Of the articles/comments that get downvoted, what proportion receive a significant number of upvotes and downvotes, and what proportion are just downvoted?

(I regret I did not have the time to write this shorter)