How would you objectively identify such a thing? 'I think this downvote is dumb' isn't sufficient, obviously.

If the moderators have a record of who's doing the voting, it might even be possible for some form of AI to detect the most habitual negative sources.

It could happen.

For about the last year, about the only time I log in is to upvote somebody, and usually a while after I read their message. It can bug me for some time when it's one where I just can't settle for them being downvoted, or alternatively some upvotes are never enough.

Once logged in the sky can be the limit on my own comments sometimes, as I've mentioned before I guess all I have ever done is now known as responding to prompts.

I thought you meant literal bots. It can't be hard to figure out which accounts are downvoting and even rate-limit it per time period, per discussion, per user downvoted, etc.

If they exist, I would probably be a candidate target for one (or more).

I have a number of Commissioner Dreyfus-level haters. One pops up, from time to time, screeches, and throws poo. It’s kind of cute, actually.

I cry myself to sleep, every night, over it.

HN should make an exception and allow the poo emoji. It would save a lot of words and BS, and time-consuming attempts at rationlization, because really that's all some comments have to say: 'I don't like this, regardless of any evidence or reason or merit'. That would be honest - it's not the HN ideal but those comments are and will always be present regardless.

Imagine a comment with a string of poo comments beneath it. It would get their point across and the silliness would save bad feelings and flamewars. @dang should try it on April 1st or something. I'm serious - it would lighten things up a bit around here and, as I said, dispel a lot of white lies and manipulative posts.

If you post poo, that's the only character allowed in that comment, and maybe your only response allowed in that subthread. Also, you can't downvote the parent, and nobody can respond to or vote on a poo post. The UI would just be knowing how to manually enter the correct Unicode codepoint. New and recent accounts can't poop - bathrooms for regular customers only!

(I've now revised this comment about five times as I've refined my idea.)