It's a good point; I have to say that, whatever other gripes I may sometimes have about it, HN is probably the most well moderated community I'm a part of.

> How else would you deal with people who abuse the vouch system?

So I think what I'm curious about is what constitutes "abuse" and how it's enforced. Like, are we saying that dang and friends have the ability to manually revoke someone's ability to vouch if they vouch for unhelpful comments on a frequent basis or if it's determined they're a sockpuppet account or something, or is there some more automated system that revokes a person's ability to vouch after some number of comments they've vouched are re-flagged?

I suppose I'd always imagined that the (fairly high, in the case of downvoting) karma threshold you have to reach to obtain privileges like vouching and downvoting would do a reasonably good job at filtering out those who might abuse such privileges, and that other remedies would be used rarely - and certainly not often enough to merit your earlier comment:

> It’s not possible to vouch it in its current state, because [...] at worst I’d lose my vouch privileges.

and the sentiment of fear I read into it.