So why not incorporate blocks as a signal for the ranking algorithm? The simple version is every person that blocks $USER causes a -n modifier on all of $USER's content; more complex versions could scale the modifier with the number of people (or the combined "reputation" of the people) blocking $USER or shadowban them once x% of posters block them.

Open to abuse? Potentially, but so are a lot of community voting features, and reliably muting serial trolls would be a useful feature for a lot of social sites.

One problem I immediately see with this is that it's difficult to define what a serial troll (excluding bot accounts) is vs someone a community doesn't like for whatever reason, using a downvoting system at least provides some leeway in discussion that is on the boundary of what is and isn't commonly accepted for a given comment at a given time within a conversation.

Downvoting doesn’t work that well

The main issue is that if a comment gets downvoted when newly created, it looses almost all visibility (gets shown further down), and it mostly does just from one downvote

This just creates and echo chamber where only the most accepted/mainstream opinions bubble up

It would be nice if we could “sort by controversial” or “sort by new”, so that we got more variety of opinions

While I understand that argument, I imagine most regular readers do not have the down vote privilege and may not for a long time, if ever. (I'm not sure in fact what the threshhold is, but it seems to be high.) To post enough and get upvoted enough to achieve it probably takes years on average.

That's a very interesting question. I always assumed most daily users do, by a wide margin, but I never actually had any data to base that off of. I even thought this before I had the 501 karma needed.

By absolute user count I'd definitely expect most to not have it but only because most accounts aren't regularly used (many even abandoned).

That's fair; I am also only using supposition.

A little example: I’ve used the site for a little over 4 years but don’t usually post or comment. If I do comment, it’s something really specific or to try and help clear a misunderstanding so usually low karma amounts. I regularly participate through flagging and upvotes but only have ~50 karma so I still can’t downvote and will likely never be able to.

Not saying it shouldn’t be this way, but downvotes are heavily biased toward people who regularly post or comment.

Another example: I have this account since 2015 and I started reading HN years before. I still can't downvote.

It's only 500 karma, a handful of successful posts will get you there. If you want to farm points, just go to /new, look for threads with 1-2 other comments and post something that is likely to be upvoted. Don't forget to upvote the post.

> only 500 karma

I think you underestimate how little some of us have to say.

Exactly, I just absorb whatever I read and comment in rare circumstances. In those rare circumstances, there's many times where people have said what I wanted.

Interesting that many subreddits have removed downvoting, for a variety of reasons.

One of the problems for subreddits is people coming from the front page or from other subreddits, who are not part of the community of that subreddit, and begin to downvote things etc.

HN is lucky in this regard; there is just one HN, not uncountable “sub-HNs”.

Of course people can still come from other places to HN. But to earn downvote privileges here you first need some amount of karma. So hopefully this makes it so that downvote privileges on HN are mostly handed to people who are at least somewhat aligned with the broader community here.

MY understanding of this community is that we strive to not be Reddit, especially from the discourse and moderation perspectives.

My understanding is that HN exists without reference to reddit, other than to ask people not to compare it to reddit again.

Is that actually possible now? I remember a few years ago, some moderators removed downvoting for people who aren't subscribed to their sub using custom css, but of course it was easy to circumvent and didn't affect mobile users.

Blocking downvoting hides gamed/promoted comments, so it's a situation that moderators would generally prefer. It's definitely the reason Youtube did it; because it was ditching individual creators without professional production values and trying to promote corporate traditional broadcast content.

50 inauthentic upvotes for something no one likes, while hundreds of frustrated potential downvoters fume. Then someone puts up a reply designed to be upvoted as a proxy for the lack of ability to downvote the inauthentically boosted comment, and that reply is quickly deleted as trolling or a personal attack.

Showing the total number of views like Twitter does now is a positively-vibed kludge for people who hate the whiff of negativity, although all of Twitter's stats seem wonky as hell under new leadership. Still, a low upvote/view ratio can also represent indifference or people not believing they're qualified to comment on something, rather than being a great signal for disapproval.

So you can still game that pretty well by Gish Galloping with a ton of broad references (entire papers or books rather than passages from them or reasonable summaries), and lots of people will disqualify themselves from downvoting because they aren't going to click through to the papers, while others will upvote just because it looks like the commenter is making an effort.

That is kinda shifting more of the moderation burden onto the people most likely to receive negative interaction and harassment yeah?

Right, it would make more sense to have a plugin that makes your account automatically downvote any of those users' comments as you encounter them. Or even better, periodically pull up their latest comments and downvote them.

Not advocating that, of course, and it feels contrary to what the benevolent mod team would prefer. And I assume that the site has some countermeasure for that, like it does against upvoting a submission that you accessed via direct link instead from from the main site?