Oh but these are examples for making people not do stuff (like not flag, vote, or even come back to the site). I don't feel like that's evil at all.

One "feature" of HN that makes me not to vote is that you can't change your mind. On mobile devices, where it is very easy to hit the wrong arrow, I fall back to read-only mode.

What is the difference between convincing people to do something and convincing them not to do something? Both are the same thing: Convincing people to exhibit a desired behaviour.

Looking at the headline, the theme here is "dirty tricks". Evil intent. And while I agree that you can use dirty tricks to make people not do something they'd better do, I fail to see how the examples given by the GP speak of evil intent.

Heard of the Dead Man Test? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applied_behavior_analysis#Behav... "If a dead man can do it, it ain't behavior, and if a dead man can't do it, then it is behavior."

and the biggest one of all, the inability to downvote.

You can downvote once you pass a karma threshold. But don't worry about it too much; hopefully you will not be using it much here.

You can down vote comments once you get 201 karma. Articles can't be downvoted. (And don't you dare use the flag as a downvote, that's a no no ;)