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Ask HN: What determines whether the down-mod is enabled?
It seems quite arbitrary: definitely not based on the age of the comment/post. Just how does it work? Apologies if this is covered in an FAQ somewhere.
- rms 17y agoYou can't downmod root comments on a story you submit or replies to your comments. You can't downmod comments older than 24 hours. You need a certain amount of karma before you can ever downmod comments, and no one can ever downmod stories.
- pg 17y ago(def canvote (user i dir) (and user (news-type i) (live i) (or (is dir 'up) (> i!score lowest-score*)) (no ((votes user) i!id)) (or (is dir 'up) (and (acomment i) (> (karma user) downvote-threshold*) (no (aand i!parent (author user (item it))))))))
- alexkearns 17y ago@pg Can I make a suggestion: down voting a comment should cost the down voter a karma point, as well as the person who wrote the comment. This would ensure that people would think twice about down voting, and only down vote items that they really did not like. I suggest this because I have seen many innocuous short comments - some attempts at humor - being downvoted to -10 or so. This seems somewhat unfair on the commenter.
- pj 17y agoI prefer cl where you get a daily refilled bucket of points you can assign to a post. you have so many points to assign (up or down) and you get more of those points over time. If you really like something a lot, you can give it 5 ups. if you really hate it, 5 downs... You start with none and can get 10, 20, 30... depending on account age. cl doesn't have karma points, so perhaps the daily bucket size could be determined by karma points...
- TomOfTTB 17y agoI upvoted you because I don't think you deserve to lose points for this post and someone else had already down voted you. That said this is like the stupidest idea I've ever heard. I'm no fan of the down vote but it exists to allow the community to weed out undesirable comments. So those people who use it are at least trying to perform a service to the community. To penalized them for that is ridiculous.
- kaens 17y agoI seem to remember that being the case on HN a while ago, can anyone confirm? If it was, I don't remember why it got changed, but there would have been a good reason for it. Unfortunately, I may just be confusing my web-site histories.
- lucumo 17y agoAll of a sudden I understand what non-programmers looking at my code go through. "That's gibberish!" "No, it's easy." "..."
- asciilifeform 17y agoThanks!
- dfranke 17y agoThis code doesn't appear to include the anti-karma-bombing restriction on downvoting old comments.