I am not sure adding a cost to downvotes would promote diversity so much. It is easy to game the system and post popular opinions to farm upvotes. If you do wha

I am not sure adding a cost to downvotes would promote diversity so much. It is easy to game the system and post popular opinions to farm upvotes. If you do what you say, you give more power to the people already playing the reputation game. You also let garbage fester because nobody will use points to downvote a stupid, agressive one-liner. My experience is that: - voting on HN works well for its intended purpose, which is surfacing the interesting conversations - dead comments really deserve to die (I can’t remember a counter-example) - greyed out comments tend to be right but unpopular, or right but rude, or wrong, or just stupid. Of these, the problematic cases are “right but unpopular”, which is not that frequent. And when it happens that’s fine, they are still readable. > I also wonder, for a site like hacker news what's the point of even showing the user the # of upvotes they've obtained? I assume it promotes engaging in the comments. It’s true that popularity contests should not be encouraged too much, but at the same time I can see how having a number that can go down would make some people think twice before knee-jerk posting or casual trolling.