Upvote if you want the comment to appear higher up in the page of comments; Downvote if you want the comment to appear lower down in the page of comments and be

Upvote if you want the comment to appear higher up in the page of comments; Downvote if you want the comment to appear lower down in the page of comments and be a lighter shade of grey. With the added warning that your actions will have an effect on the voting and commenting behaviours of other hacker news readers in the long term, but this will mostly align well with the above affects. Edit: I should add that most people upvote differently on Hacker News than they do on Reddit, because of the second effect whereby they might not necessarily think a comment is rude, but if it doesn't add anything to discussion they will downvote in the hope that the comments in the long run will be more helpful.