Disclaimer: I don't know how the downvoting privileges are actually assigned. The necessary karma threshold for downvoting is already prohibitively high, but s

Disclaimer: I don't know how the downvoting privileges are actually assigned. The necessary karma threshold for downvoting is already prohibitively high, but submission karma and comment karma seem to be shared. That means if you get one lucky submission, such as the announcement of the next major release of a popular project, you likely get shot over the threshold relatively fast. If the gain from there isn't modulated (or doesn't require a separate, sufficently high amount of comment karma), that may give people downvoting privileges too early, before they've familiarized themselves enough with HN.