[krapp]

>Lack of a down-vote means vocal minorities are disproportionately represented. How many Hacker News users really want to see 5 stories about the TSA body scanners every time they log in?

Clearly some do, if these stories get upvoted. I think a better answer than downvoting would be a ways to organize and filter content besides the single-channel model which currently seems to assume either a homogenous community or content or both. Clearly useless and repetitive content should be flagged, but judging by the number of "this doesn't belong on HN / yes it does " comments i've seen, a lot of people have differing ideas of what Hacker News "should" be showing them.

> Votes on comments are used to express agreement or disagreement rather than value, perhaps because many people simply cannot see the difference between the two.

I believe upvotes and downvotes should only apply to threads themselves, and comments should be left alone. I'm sure i'm in the minority on this among HN users, but I think when you can downvote comments, then specious downvoting becomes inevitable because it's less work than coming up with a cogent or relevant comment.

[X4]

Glad to hear someone else think the same. I believe that it won't change in here though. Someone said: "If you don't like it, fork it" and this is probably true in this case. Maybe even a business opportunity.

However, I somehow lost the hope that bringing this topic would do any change. I even emailed pg, asking to delete my account including all my posts, but got no response ever. idk..

[krapp]

I think I may have heard kogir mention they don't let people delete accounts and they don't delete posts because it would interfere with the structure of the existing threads. That does kind of make sense but people can still delete individual posts even after they've been replied to so I don't know.

And "forking it" would be the (relatively) easy part. The hard part is getting people to show up and stick around.

[X4]

Other social networks solve that "problem", by just filling the old posts with "deleted content" and replace the username with "Deleted user".