zlacker

they are not "effectively useless", they just useless by you, a non participant / browser of the site.

>>daleha+(OP)
Considering I hadn't seen a single negative voted comment in a few dozen visits to HN, I'd say they're at the very least underutilized. Although I did notice that a few people went out of their way to vote down stuff in this thread. Ironic? :)

>>coding+j
there is also significantly less witty one liners / sarcastic replies / downright attacks, at least compared to most communities I have seen.

that suggests they are overutilized elsewhere and work pretty well here, I am not adverse to opposing viewpoints, I just dont want to see plainly dumb comments, if you overuse it, then it loses meaning.

(taking this thread as a test data, while I dont agree with a lot of what people have said, I wouldnt have downvoted any)

>>coding+j
No, it's not ironic. It's business as usual at HN. Posts get downvoted all the time. In fact, a more recent problem has been people overusing downvotes.

It sounds like you didn't actually understand the dynamics of the HN community. You sound silly insisting your initial impression is even partially right, when the whole community is telling you the opposite. (This applies only to posts, of course. Downvotes still don't exist for stories themselves, outside of flagging.)

>>coding+j
I don't have any hard data, but I'd estimate (as a heavy user) that at least half the stories with comments have at least one that has been downvoted below 1... but piling on someone is rare, just because it's rare that someone says something that needs to be piled on.

As for your assertion that not disclosing the karma threshold for downvoting is 'bizarre', I'd argue it's useful not to provide an exact number. Enough video games have 'achievements' listed out for people to obtain... I'd rather have people participate honestly than just to gain more 'abilities'.

>>Xichek+X2
Usually racism, bigotry and basically any purely ignorant BS gets piled on. An unpopular comment usually only gets downvoted to between -1 and -5, however recently there has been a problem with (I'm assuming) new users downvoting anything they don't like, which thankfully seems to be going away.