Perhaps a gentle warning built into the voting system will suffice. I like the concept of downvoting to express disagreement (rather than cluttering the thread with replies), but I don't think anyone should downvote a comment into negative figures unless it was actually abusive. That creates bad will, which breeds more bad will, et cetera. So what about a little message that pops up saying
"Are you sure you want to downvote this comment? Doing so will push its karma into negative figures. At HN we don't encourage this type of downvoting except in response to abusive content. "
In my experience some people just don't have a clue how to behave online and it's not even expected of them in most places. HN is different.
"Are you sure you want to downvote this comment? Doing so will push its karma into negative figures. At HN we don't encourage this type of downvoting except in response to abusive content. "
In my experience some people just don't have a clue how to behave online and it's not even expected of them in most places. HN is different.