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No downvote arrows appear for me either, so it's not just you. They appear on other items, so it's not just me. The item is only a day old, so it's not the "s

No downvote arrows appear for me either, so it's not just you. They appear on other items, so it's not just me. The item is only a day old, so it's not the "stale-out" feature. It appears to be just that item. As with other measures PG takes to try to prevent abuse of the system, and occasional abuse by people of people on the system, it may be that there is a mechanism by which he can disable downvoting on a given item. In this instance it wouldn't surprise me. Completely guessing here, but healthcare is one of the topics that can provoke intense reactions, and people can get very heated, and downvoting can pile on, even when it's not really justified. Replies and comments can get unpleasant, so disabling downvoting may be a defence. I'm not defending the way the system works, and I occasionally wish it were more open, but this site is still working reasonably well despite its popularity. I think that is mostly because of the occasional draconian and obscure measure. I've given up worrying about wrinkles like this. They still annoy me on occasion, but I shrug and move on. The site continues to decline, but less quickly than others I've been on. I accept that I won't know everything about the way the site works, and part of the reason for that enables it to continue to do so.

DanielBMarkham 17y ago
I was thinking along similar lines -- that somehow, somebody, somewhere had flagged the article because of the subject matter. I'm a hacker. I like knowing how things work. If I have a little up and down arrow, I want to click it and watch the little number get bigger or smaller. It's not too much to ask, is it? It's already impossible to determine how the system sorts -- but I think that bit of obscurity works for everybody. Having buttons appear or disappear randomly sounds like a way to annoy people. There's also the issue of the buttons not actually changing the score -- another pain for some users.
mbrubeck 17y ago
"The item is only a day old, so it's not the "stale-out" feature." I was pretty sure that downvoting is disabled as soon as a comment is one day old. Check out the "bestcomments" list and you'll see that you can only downvote the ones that are less than 24 hours old. I can currently downvote several of the <1-day comments on the healthcare story. But maybe I'm seeing something different from you, or it has changed since this post was made.
- RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
  It appears that you're right - good call. I thought it was 2 days, perhaps that's been reduced of late.

DanielBMarkham 17y ago

I was thinking along similar lines -- that somehow, somebody, somewhere had flagged the article because of the subject matter. I'm a hacker. I like knowing how things work. If I have a little up and down arrow, I want to click it and watch the little number get bigger or smaller. It's not too much to ask, is it? It's already impossible to determine how the system sorts -- but I think that bit of obscurity works for everybody. Having buttons appear or disappear randomly sounds like a way to annoy people. There's also the issue of the buttons not actually changing the score -- another pain for some users.

mbrubeck 17y ago

"The item is only a day old, so it's not the "stale-out" feature." I was pretty sure that downvoting is disabled as soon as a comment is one day old. Check out the "bestcomments" list and you'll see that you can only downvote the ones that are less than 24 hours old. I can currently downvote several of the <1-day comments on the healthcare story. But maybe I'm seeing something different from you, or it has changed since this post was made.

RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
It appears that you're right - good call. I thought it was 2 days, perhaps that's been reduced of late.