
Ask HN: Where's the downvote button? - mpetkevicius
I&#x27;ve been wondering for awhile now how some comments on HN become greyed out. Is there a downvote or report button?<p>I&#x27;m also having a suspicion that the [-] button on the right, which I&#x27;ve been using to collapse threads, might be the one. Either way, I find HN&#x27;s UX confusing.
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sunseb
By the way I think that this downvote button is really a bad feature that
brings negativity.

Don't like a post? Just ignore and don't upvote it!

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RossM
I always liked Reddit's intended approach: downvote comments that don't add to
the conversation.

Sadly, votes are too easily mapped to agree/disagree or truth/falsehood - see
the "1,800 karma" comment below as a key example, where it furthers the
conversation but is downvoted "because they are incorrect".

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Tomte
Yes, both. Downvote and flag.

You need x karma to see it.

The [-] collapses the subthread, nothing more.

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throwaway4Later
x is actually 501.

Even past that threshold, you can't downvote responses to your own comments.
That's probably a wise limitation when you think about it.

Downvoting threads is done with the "flag" button which appears at the same
time. Unfortunately, as HN has grown past a certain size, there's gotten to be
a critical mass of "made" high-karma censors, who flag nascent postings on a
whim. The diversity of articles suffers, limited now to either the things
censors like, plus a small selection of postings where teams will "unflag"
(also available at 501) this price-of-admission flagging.

Running any kind of good forum is hard, and HN's moderators work really hard
at it, but "strangled-in-the-crib" flagging both takes away from the value of
the site and gamifies the forum to where it now takes a team to make a posting
that survives. I don't have an easy solution, though it might be worth trying
to limit flags to one, two, or ten per day.

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ChrisGranger
I have well under 501 karma, and I'm able to flag articles as well as vouch
for dead ones.

I think your idea of limiting the number of flags a user has per day is a good
one. I'm kind of surprised that isn't the default behavior already...

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romanovcode
AFAIK you need 500 points to unlock "downvote" functionality.

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dotcoma
That's a urban legend.

I have over 1,800 points, and there's no downvote to be seen.

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agumonkey
I see no downvote on articles.

I do see downvote on some comments (not all).

The rules seem subtle.

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kazinator
Quite consistently: no downvote button on comments more than 24 hours old; no
downvote button on comments that are followups to your own comment.

Submissions don't have downvoting, but you can flag them.

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Raed667
> There are no down arrows on stories. They appear on comments after users
> reach a certain karma threshold, but never on direct replies.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

