> Honestly I think HN would be better without downvoting at all. I don't entirely agree with this statement. If you're going to be doing threaded conversations

> Honestly I think HN would be better without downvoting at all. I don't entirely agree with this statement. If you're going to be doing threaded conversations, having a system that can influence the sort order of those conversations isn't necessarily a bad thing. I've been thinking about HN's downvotes for a while now, and I kinda think -based on my overwhelmingly positive experience with the Pre-SJW Metafilter- that HN should either have strict time-based ordering for threads with up/downvotes only serving to give you Whuffie, or have up/downvotes control sort order, but not grey out comments that are below 1.