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I don't have a downvote button, probably because I'm new and I don't have enough karma. I wanted more than once to downvote insulting comments, but alas, I cann

I don't have a downvote button, probably because I'm new and I don't have enough karma. I wanted more than once to downvote insulting comments, but alas, I cannot. I can upvote, however, meaning that I have both the ability to insult in comments and upvote insults that agree with whatever I want to insult at the time. That seems like a recipe for abuse if/when the userbase increases unexpectedly by a large magnitude, as older users wouldn't have the numbers for cutting down this behavior. But other than closing down registrations and sending new applicants to "Hacker News 2", I don't know how to fix this.

dragonwriter 13y ago
The simple solution would be to weight votes (upvotes and downvotes) by a function of karma, so that the upvotes from lower-karma new users that can't yet downvote would be less powerful than downvotes from longer-established users. (OTOH, that could have undesirable side effects, as it could, outside the domain of managing tone, result in a strong bias for older technologies and against new technologies, if it is the case that, on average, technical folks have a tendency to get attached to the technologies that were "hot" when they were establishing themselves and prone to seeing newer technologies as threats -- that's something I've seen enough to suspect it is a general, though far from universal, trend.)