I was under the impression that voting rings and whatnot are already something that dang and the other mods watch out for; we as users don't need to see who dow

I was under the impression that voting rings and whatnot are already something that dang and the other mods watch out for; we as users don't need to see who downvotes us. If we could see identifiable information about downvotes, it would be too tempting to downvote THEM out of revenge. I don't think I would do such a thing, but I don't even want to have such knowledge color my reading of future comments. Part of the intention of HN is that we read and vote on comments for their merits and contribution to a discussion -- even if we don't always agree with the author -- and I would not want to discount someone's writing just because they downvoted something I wrote. Maybe if there were a one-way hash of usernames we could see for who downvotes, we could have public insight into the insight of voter rings ("____ has downvoted my comments 3000% more than anyone else ...") without the chance of contaminating our perception of others' discourse, but I doubt that we have better info than the mods already have about posters.