There's definitely a school of thought on HN which would say so. Upvotes are a fine proxy for appreciation. Other online communities have taken steps to remove

There's definitely a school of thought on HN which would say so. Upvotes are a fine proxy for appreciation. Other online communities have taken steps to remove verbose "+1" mechanisms too - for example, GitHub, as per demand, added the ability to respond "+1" to comments without having to write an entirely new comment. That indicates that consumers of GitHub (and most HN users are probably in that demographic) value brevity. Personally, I suspect a post saying only "Awesome post" would have garnered 0 or only a couple downvotes. However, the hangover comment was - in my opinion - a bit self-indulgent, irrelevant, and not in any of the broad categories of things people come on HN to find. My $.02 only.