[sndwnm]

I never downvote and almost never upvote. Having spent time on 4chan and other imageboards, I have seen discussions work just fine without any ranking mechanism, and as such I have become skeptical of the usual upvote schemes.

When there are no ranks (or even usernames), you need to use your own thinking to evaluate the posts. Even if it requires more scrolling, it's worth it. If you are looking for the hot parts of the discussion, you can use the number of replies to a given post as a proxy — it could be considered a UI issue of HN that it's not shown very clearly here.