> So is the problem that the people with the power don't exercise it, or that people don't upvote the reasonable comments in a sufficient ratio to push the bad

> So is the problem that the people with the power don't exercise it, or that people don't upvote the reasonable comments in a sufficient ratio to push the bad comments down? So, I can't speak for everyone but it's fairly rare that I down-vote a post that appears to have been written in good faith (even so-called "middlebrow dismissals"). I would imagine (or, indeed hope) that most users with the ability to down-vote are fairly conservative with it. It's important to keep flame bait and trolling comments off of HN, but I'm less sure where to draw the line WRT comments whose content I find uninteresting.