> I think we may be talking past each other. Ah OK, I understand. I actually agree that mentioning downvoting matters for the reader (it's an irrelevant thing

> I think we may be talking past each other. Ah OK, I understand. I actually agree that mentioning downvoting matters for the reader (it's an irrelevant thing that takes away his time), but I don't think it should matter for people who choose to participate, either by replying or moderation. I also agree with the HN guidelines that you quoted, although of course without downvoting those wouldn't be neccessary. > I've been doing exactly as you recommend I appreciate that. > I'm purposely not addressing them as that's too large a discussion which will go too far afield That's fine, I agree it's offtopic. Unfortunately, HN doesn't seem to provide good forum for these matters. Even in general I think this is a hard to solve problem, how to avoid discussions to turn into irrelevancy, which can be given by fleeting nature of these discussions. I am thinking, maybe someone in the future will apply some NLP learning to automatically mark threads that become offtopic (and collapses them or moves them elsewhere); that could perhaps solve the problem for reader that downvoting intends to solve.