

Ask HN: Who has downvote privileges and what is the criteria? - pbreit

I see a lot of questionable downvotes and non-downvotes and was wondering who has downvoting privileges and if there was any specific criteria?
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ColinWright
Currently you get downvoting privileges when you have 500 karma.

This search -
[http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=downvote+th...](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=downvote+threshold)
\- gives several places where your question is answered.

~~~
joelhaus
Believe it was upped from a threshold of 200 or 300 karma about a year ago.

Would like to see down-vote capability weighted much less on submission up-
votes and more on comment up-votes.

Yesterday, someone noted how many repeats there are of popular stories on the
front page; I would posit that this is, at least in part, related to the karma
value of up-votes on submissions.

~~~
brudgers
Submissions don't get downvotes (unless they occur at a threshold beyond my
karma score), instead they are flagged which - like downvotes do for comments
- moves them down the list ranking.

~~~
glimcat
Is that what "flag" does? I like the minimalist interface, but it goes to far
into "what the crap does this do" territory in a few places.

~~~
ColinWright
Generally you're expected to spend some time getting used to the culture
around here. The information is there to be found if you put in the effort.

It's specifically and deliberately user hostile. People unwilling or unable to
make the effort or take the time usually get frustrated and leave, or ask
questions and get enculturated.

You're not expected to understand everything instantly, and the usage of these
things is expected to change over time anyway. Their purpose wasn't set in
stone to begin with, and already has changed. For example, the down-vote used
to mean "This doesn't belong on HN" but has evolved to include "I don't
agree".

And flag does more than just act as a downvote on submissions - it indicates
that the item shouldn't be on HN and is used for spam, troll, seriously off-
topic, and by some, for repeats of recently submitted stories. Enough flags
and a submission is auto-killed.

~~~
dfc
I think downvoting would provide a greater benefit to the HN community if a
commenter was somehow made aware that their comment was down voted. Maybe next
to the score show the number of downvotes in red (if there are any).

Onetime I noticed that my karma went down but I could not tell what comment
was downvoted. It could have been a learning moment but instead it was a
mystery.

~~~
tokenadult
Any comment that has a downward change in score must have been downvoted.
Can't you see the scores of your own comments? I thought each user could see
his or her own comment scores when logged in.

In the extreme case, any user can tell if a comment has negative karma,
because the comment starts to gray out. No comment receives downvotes for more
than twenty-four hours.

~~~
dfc
I actually noticed someones comment turning grey today but I did not know why.
I do not think that is in the FAQ.

What does this mean:

"no comment receives downvotes for more than 24 hours."?

~~~
ColinWright
A comment turns grey when its points value goes to 0, and goes more grey as it
goes more negative.

    
    
        "no comment receives downvotes for more than 24 hours."
    

This means that the downvote arrow is only visible/enables on a comment for 24
hours. Once a comment is more than 24 hours old you can no longer downvote it.

~~~
dfc
So I recently had a comment downvoted in this thread about bitcoin's
legal/regulatory environment:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2817899>

I posted a link to a law review article and the link was downvoted. It does
not make a lot of sense why...

