3 ms·

I imagine it still represents an added cost, which works towards suppressing or adding difficulty towards facilitating comment / post manipulation as GP alludes

• krapp 5y ago
  Much of that cost is offset by the design of Hacker News being biased towards flagging and downvoting. Plenty of threads get flagged into oblivion because a couple of people objected to them, and several people have noticed every comment in their history getting voted down from time to time. Upranking posts by manipulation is difficult, downranking them is almost child's play. What really offsets that isn't the karma cost for upvotes but the moderators' own manual tweaking of the knobs, sometimes correcting improper flags and changing the rankings, which can't really be gamed around.