And I would have downvoted, except there is no downvote button, and I'm too honest to flag.

I wonder what's the karma requirement to downvote posts, not just comments, but clearly it's over 2000.

You can’t downvotes submissions at any karma level[1].

> There are no down arrows on stories. They appear on comments after users reach a certain karma threshold, but never on direct replies.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Hm, interesting. I suppose it does prevent mass bot downvotes, but it also stops the community from pre-emptively removing posts such as this one that just stir up rage. Reddit would probably be unreadable without post downvotes.

Users can flag posts, which is kind of like a super-downvote. HN also penalizes posts that generate too many comments too fast, which it interprets as controversial.

Flagging would be an abuse of another feature. I don't think the original post is quite wrong as in illegal or harmful or off topic.

The commenter here's upvote counted, my downvote did not count.

And I won't just use any other available form of attack like falsely accusing the post of some wrongdoing just because I want to criticise something and that's the only way to do it.

I did leave a critical comment but that is a seperate issue because you can leave a positive comment and upvote. So the ability to comment nulls out.

Now that’s just crossing the line.