HN's strategy of burying unpopular posts is very, very strange to me. While reddit's is similar, at least you can disable it manually - to do that for HN would require tampermonkey or the equivalent. Half the time I wind up just highlighting the text to read what someone wrote anyways. I don't really get it.

I still can't downvote after almost 3 years. I don't comment very often, so I don't have an incentive to chase the downvote privilege. But the thing is, after all this time, I dont want to downvote anymore, like the first time I came here. I just read and enjoy the place.

I can't downvote people, nor do I have any interest in doing so.

I don't upvote people either.

I've been around here close to 5 years and I still can't downvote. I wouldn't say that it is a bad thing -- it just causes me to use HN very differently than Reddit (which seems to be the point).

Sure it is.

I believe it is better to elevate good posts/posts that I like, than silencing bad posts/posts that I dislike.

I think there should only be UPvotes.