[arstin]

I don’t see why HN doesn’t require every down vote to have a comment. Judging from the sheets of gray on most threads, most down voted comments aren’t actually in violation of site policy, off topic, trolling, etc. It’s just a few little people disagreed. Which is fine! But it’s not constructive or interesting to just slap the commenter with your dick.

[TeMPOraL]

Because then every other comment would have a stream of replies justifying the downvotes - replies which, presumably, would be regular comments, and thus susceptible to further downvotes (with comments)!

In other words, this would be a huge noise generator.