[mratzloff]

It's all about clear standards and strong moderation. I visit another forum that has a great community. No karma, no voting, just those two things. I've also run a large community in the past that I believe was successful for those reasons.

[itronitron]

The moderation is strong but not heavy-handed. The clear standards allow commenters to understand why they get downvoted or flagged which is nice. I have seen nitpicky over-active moderators on a different forum site effectively wipe out community engagement over the course of a year and it wasn't fun.

[ThomPete]

In general, downvotes are fair but sometimes, unfortunately, it gets misused to express disagreement of opinion which isn't the purpose on HN.

If I was allowed to make one change on HN it would be that a downvote had to be accompanied by a comment as to why the downvote happens.

[peoplewindow]

I'd probably just abolish downvoting entirely: rely entirely on upvoting. There's already a bias towards upvoting in the system due to the min cap but not the max cap.

You make it sound like voting-as-disagreement is rare but in my experience it's by far the most common way downvotes are used. I have showdead switched on and I keep toying with the idea of finding an extension to un-grey comments, because over and over I find comments in grey that are well written, erudite and merely express an opinion that goes against the current startup-culture HN zeitgeist. They aren't actually bad comments though.

So why not just let good comments rise to the top.

[spiralx]

The user style I've made for HN reduces the level of greying out considerably - dead comments are only 50% black instead of 14% black for instance.

https://userstyles.org/styles/156181/hacker-news-improved-re...

If you had a user style extension you could just change the five styles used to grey out down-voted and dead comments.

[ThomPete]

Perhaps you are right. I have experienced downvotes primarily in semi politicized discussions like automation, economics blockchain, diversity discussions. Most technical posts seems fairly balanced.

Perhaps yeah abolish downvote and only have flag for admins and people with high karma is a good idea.

[tedmiston]

That seems like a decent idea but a bit tedious for the voter. I also like the Stack Overflow model where each downvote costs 1 of your own karma points.