Finally, Hacker News gets closer to Slashdot. Now all we need is abstracts for stories, and the karma system that lets people communicate what their vote means.
You can learn about this on a post on GitHub about much (but not all) of HN's undocumented behavior [1]:
"All comments start with a score of 1 point (but in order to prevent bandwagoning, the comment score is not visible to users other than the author). After users reach 501 Karma, they gain the ability to downvote another comment. Downvoted comments (i.e. with a score < 1) reduce their placement on the comment thread and will appear desaturated to other users deemphasize them."
That’s more how than why. I also want to know why people downvote things a lot of the time. I’m not perfect at always commenting productively but I really try, and it miffs me when I add something I think has value and see it downvoted without a comment explaining why. Sometimes it’s a topic under debate and I’m trying to better just accept that people are disagreeing without using their words. Sometimes though it’s a technical topic with no apparent disagreement and I share some insight about the topic, and just wonder why anyone thought “nope it’s bad you shared that knowledge”.
Sorry, perhaps I phrased that poorly. I understand that gray is a sign of negative score; I mean to say that it would be helpful to have an understanding of why a comment has been downvoted. Sometimes it's clear; some comments are rude, unhelpful, factually incorrect, etc. But sometimes it's not clear at all: Did people just disagree? Is there a factual error that I can't see? Sometimes grayed-out comments with no replies are really frustrating, because I can't see why they got downvoted. Slashdot's system is nice in that it at least makes people give a hint as to why a comment was downmodded. (I'm not saying I strongly want that system specifically, just something to provide more signal.)
