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Comment by ColinWright | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Abusive downvoting bothers me on occasion. For that, there's Reddit.

But ambiguous UI elements aren't going to have that effect. People will generally either misuse them habitually or ignore them. The human mind is awesome at filtering out noise.

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.

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.

You are right that users can see scores for their own comments, but I it doesn't show the number of up and down votes (like slashdot, reddit, etc. do). The parent said he wasn't sure which among multiple recent comments was downvoted. It can also be a mystery if a user isn't constantly watching karma as it changes.

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."?

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.

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...

Downvotes will always mean "I don't agree". It's like saying "I don't want to get wet so turn off the rain". No, no, no , us better people can change the weather, we are ELITE.

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