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Ask HN: What karma level unlocks the topic downvote button?

9 points by mrchess ↗ HN
I've been frustrated at the quality of the FP lately and I have been desperately wanting to downvote some redundant or speculative content, but I have no idea when I get my downvote button.

I thought it was at 100, then 200, then 400 karma, but still no dice... Does anyone know the threshold when you get it?

7 comments

[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 31.3 ms ] thread
cowsaysoink
No topic downvote only comment downvote (which I think is around 500).

Closest you get is flag which happens at around 20 karma and reduces the staying power of a post.

sbierwagen
Note that if you flag too many dumb submissions, like bitcoin spam and singularityhub garbage, then a mod will disable your flag button.
JoachimSchipper
This has observably not happened to me, despite me being rather flag-happy.

(Not saying you're wrong; you're just not universally right.)

mrchess
Wow, after all this time I never realized there was no topic downvote. Thanks for the info.
tokenadult
I've been frustrated at the quality of the FP lately

If you are frustrated by the quality of the front page on Hacker News, one thing you can do about that is emphasize the positive by visiting the new page

http://news.ycombinator.com/newest

and upvoting the stories that are good. I often see good stories on the new page that never make it to the front page. There is a lot of good stuff submitted every day on HN. Improving the signal:noise ratio here means improving both sides of the ratio, by flagging bad submissions (submissions that violate the guidelines, including submissions of on-topic content from lousy sources) and upvoting good submissions.

mrchess
There needs to be some sort of reward system for filtering out new. It would be great if they would reward 1/10th of a karma point up to a certain limit per day or something. It would be motivating!
DanBC
The reward is knowing that you're shaping a great front page!

Voting rings have been (are?) a problem for HN, and I suspect a reward system for people who are active on [new] will be open to abuse from voting rings. But I don't know - maybe there's some interesting science / math in online voting and reputation systems.