[edgyquant]

HN is heavily moderated (unsubstantial comments are flagged or removed) and it only allows people who participate to downvote. A problem with Reddit is that everyone can downvote and it’s gamified so that you want to dogpile on certain posts (it’s easy to just downvote a heavily downvoted post without reading it.) HN on the other hand hides vote count and only starts to fade heavily downvoted posts.

[freetinker]

I find HN’s method pretty effective, and the fading-comment UI implementation delightfully clever.