Hacker News Reader

I'd be interested to know if that's the case, as it'd present a shift from their long-held strategy of having the comment downvote button do absolutely nothing.

> it'd present a shift from their long-held strategy of having the comment downvote button do absolutely nothing.

This seems to be a common refrain, despite little evidence to back it up. Just because the dislike button doesn't render a count doesn't mean that it isn't being counted and used to weight comments.

Fair point. It'd be helpful if there was some transparency from Youtube.

Occam's razor says it's probably something very simple like that

seeing as the downvotes on comments aren't shown anywhere, that would surprise me a little