> "make some downvotes more powerful." > Any comment that has [xyz] should allow downvotes to be more powerful. Hmm, that's an interesting interpretation of t

> "make some downvotes more powerful." > Any comment that has [xyz] should allow downvotes to be more powerful. Hmm, that's an interesting interpretation of that phrase. I assumed that "make some downvotes more powerful" meant that more weight would be carried by some (algorithmically identified, probably based on how they voted on some manually analyzed comments) users' downvotes, or possibly by downvotes made in certain (algorithmically identified) circumstances. The following paragraph ("The majority of HN users [...] reliably downvote jerks and trolls") makes me pretty sure it's the first interpretation. Still, your comment makes me think. For an HN change to do anything to comments identified by the fact that they contain "personal attacks, abusive language, [...]", it would have to rely on either manual tagging or algorithmic analysis of comments, and the latter would inevitably be rife with false positives. However, your comment makes me realize another option: have an algorithm somewhat-clumsily tag comments based on their content, and give the tag no direct effect, but make it cause downvotes to that comment to be more heavily weighted. It's still sort of algorithmic censorship, but it has no effect except insofar as humans manually express their intent. ... Maybe useful.