[kolev]

Then do the right thing and solve the problem by removing downvote on comments - you will do this community a huge favor and you will simplify the UX as well. It has no purpose outside of emotional buildups. Upvotes give you enough for sorting purposes - it's been working well for Facebook and Twitter. For everything else, there's reddit!

[dang]

Downvotes are imperfect but HN would be worse without them. However, I don't think that has anything to do with your breaking the rule about incivility. Being downvoted, even being downvoted unfairly, is no excuse. Please only post civil comments from now on.

[kolev]

I am sure that you cannot back with any credible evidence the assumption than downvoting comments makes HN a better place. You can add flagging and that will do better, but downvoting is unhealthy. The fixed -4 threshold is random and wrong as well. The loyalty to Paul Graham's original decisions is misunderstood loyalty and there are a lot of missed opportunities here, because of these repeated mistakes.

[dang]

Going off on perennial questions of forum design is not a good way to deal with the issue here.

When people can't or won't be civil on HN, we ban their accounts. There's no exception for getting downvoted—on the contrary.

[Flenser]

I'm curious, did you know you were taking to a moderator? (dang is on the HN staff: http://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over-hack... )

I'm asking because I'm wondering if it should be made more obvious that he is when he is posting in his moderation role.

[kolev]

Yes, I know who he is. Although I had a much older account, which password I couldn't recover, because it's from the days when no email was necessary here, I frequent HN for years and that's why I care about this community as I spend a significant portion of my life in here.

[dang]

We can sometimes help people regain old accounts with no email address in them. If you still want it, you're welcome to email us ([e-mail]) with the username and we'll look into it.