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Ask HN: Did downvote requirement change again?

10 points by hrabago ↗ HN
I noticed that I'm no longer able to downvote.

I'm a frequent reader of HN, though I don't comment often. Because of this, it took me a while to get to 200, which at the time was the requirement. It changed shortly after that to 500, and a year or so ago I got to 500 and got the ability to downvote again.

I don't really downvote that often, but this afternoon I saw a message that I thought warranted downvoting (in fact it was already shown in gray text) and proceeded to downvote it. I then saw that the down arrows were not showing for me anymore.

This is a new article (on the Front Page as of this writing) and I verified I was logged in, so my conclusion was that the downvote threshold changed again. What's the requirement now? Since when did it change? Is there a page which details these requirements?

4 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 38.7 ms ] thread
mikestew
I see up and down arrows, and I think you'll find my current karma level to be particularly relevant.
Sealy
hrabago has more karma then you mikestew; 587 vs 506 at the time of typing this.
Peroni
My understanding is that downvote privileges are limited. I remember reading something a while back that effectively said that if you downvote significantly more than you upvote then you temporarily lose the ability to downvote until your upvote count creeps back up.

This is entirely anecdotal, I have no proof for my theory only a vague recollection of an explanation offered for a similar question at least a year ago.