Maybe you should allow downvoting for everyone then. I'm more likely to downvote a dismissive reply then I am to upvote every positive reply to overtake it. And on the mention of dismissive comments: as a frequent visitor I feel emotionally safer just reading and not posting... so if there is a karma threshold for allowing downvotes, I doubt I will ever hit it.
This is a great suggestion. Perhaps a good compromise would be to tie downvoting ability to a "number of days visited" threshold, rather than a karma threshold. Those who visit HN often but comment rarely may be particularly well qualified to judge whether a comment is constructive.
Edit: This might work best for voting ability in general, not just downvoting ability.
The problem is that people would abuse the downvote button and use it as a representation of "I disagree with you" is read of "this comment adds no value to the conversation."
1- Is it really a problem for the thread? If nobody agree with my comment, is it a so wrong action to pseudo-hide my comment to next readers?
2- Why users with karma will have a better understanding of downvote than the passives old-regular-readers?
Peoples who read HN every days love the high level of the comments here, let them have produce some feed back.
Note that I just defend my interest: I'm not good at creating comment with value (so I do not comment a lot), but I feel confident to reconise good comments from bad comments.
Interesting. The "reply" link is hidden for some comments - but not others - such as this one, yet I am able to bypass it by modifying the "reply" URL. Is this something new, or simply something I hadn't noticed before?
Mm, can't be that. If you highlight the area under the comment, there's a row of dashes ("-----") where the "reply" button should be. It takes up the same amount of space.
