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Comment by hackermom | Hacker News Reader

I think that's good advice, and I would like to send it along also to the tiny-minded portion of users here on HN who campaign personal, pityful battles on others by systematically downvoting their posts for no apparent reason, as well as those who just can't seem to let things fly, but rather just have to hammer down on users with opinions they simply don't agree with.

I think the karma system as it stands now is problematic because of how it simply enables the generally grumpy crowd of HN to fuel their own overgrown negativity.

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Who can down-vote? Not me. Seems to me that it's people who have written lots of good comments that can down-vote. And of course, people running scripts that help them achieve high karma that they can abuse.

A simple "I Like This" without any count would be enough IMHO.

Or at least a simple rule that you can only down-vote if you write a positively karma'd comment to the post you down-vote.

What kind of script would that be?

It won't be able to make good comments (I hope), so it would have to monitor pages that have been cited often and submit new things as soon as they pop up. Any other options?

A script that logs in to Hacker News on 10+ different accounts and upvotes comments by you. Everyone can upvote.

Wouldn't that be really easy to spot?

I think you need maybe 500 or 750 karma before you can downvote.

In theory this means that people only downvote for "doesn't belong on HN" or perhaps "blatantly factually incorrect" posts, rather than "I do not agree with this posts".

HN does have some protection against "voting rings" - so a script or a bunch of friends that all vote for each other probably would be caught. I don't know any of the internals.

I like your idea about only allowing downvoting if you can create a coherent post about why you're downvoting. But the most blatant trolls don't deserve any comment.

> In theory this means that people only downvote for "doesn't belong on HN" or perhaps "blatantly factually incorrect" posts, rather than "I do not agree with this posts".

The intention was that maybe, but is it true in practice?

> But the most blatant trolls don't deserve any comment.

Old-school individual "killfiles" would do. As it is now some people seem to be locked out of HN by a crowd of anonymous people. It seems to me that the current system is a bit naive about the goodness of how high-karmas act.

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