• You cannot downvote a comment after 24 hours have passed. (There is no time limit for upvotes.)
• You cannot downvote comments which are direct replies to your own. (There is no restriction to downvote further descendants.)
• You cannot unvote/undown a comment after (I think) one hour has passed.
• You cannot reply to a reply to one of your comments for a certain number of minutes, which increases based on some relation with nesting depth. However, the reply link appears sooner on the permalink of such comments than it does from the story page.
• You cannot edit a comment after (I think) one hour has passed.
You cannot downvote a comment after 24 hours have passed.
This is a nice feature. One reason I stopped using certain subreddits was that people would look up your comment history and downvote all your comments that weren't archived. I think those downvotes would eventually disappear, but it annoyed me enough that I stopped reading the subreddits where it happened.
AFAIK, HN has no OAuth2 or similar, so a SAAS would not work for this task; the users would have to host such software themselves on someplace that they trust with their HN password.
If you tell me your password and I downvote everyone you hate, why is that less of a service than it would be if, instead of telling me your password, you gave me a special password with fewer permissions?
On reddit you can not downvote comments from the user page. The downvote button is there but it doesn't do anything. People who know this can get around it possibly, but it's stopped a lot of that.
Eh, it's all fake internet points anyway. I occasionally get hit by an angry downvoter, but as long as your normal content is quality their effect is a drop in the bucket.
I would actually take the opposite side of this, I think saying "karma is just fake internet points" is missing something important. Karma is a rough metric for social approval, and social approval is one of the most important things for people.
Now, karma isn't actually that great of a measure of social approval (you're unlikely to encounter your downvoters in real life; it's easy to get karma by making short uncontroversial comments; etc.), but it still means something, and it makes perfect sense to me that people would care about how much karma they have.
I would discourage using karma as any measure of worth for the reasons you described. If a user has lots of negative karma that might be something else, but a large positive karma may mean nothing more than the person has been active on the site for a long time and tends to post a lot and doesn't troll frequently.
It doesn't mean they're super smart or some incredible subject matter expert or anything like that. They just have a lot of time to post and aren't a complete shithead.
In fact site operators should put extra scrutiny towards accounts that accumulate karma too quickly. That could be a sign of bot activity or "account optimization" firms making a mockery of your reputation system.
Whenever I feel sad about downvotes I remind myself that no-one will lie on their deathbed wishing they'd scored more points in the internet popularity contest.
> You cannot downvote comments which are direct replies to your own
Update: my apologies, seems that I'm wrong. The quoted statement is correct. I'm sure I saw a downvote arrow there once, though (but that was in 2017, haha)
Old comment: Maybe I'm mistaken, but I think one can - they just need to click "N minutes ago" permalink to see the down arrow. Maybe it doesn't affect the score or just cosmetic, but IIRC it's recorded and persists. Unless this was changed recently - can't check (but I swear I saw it there!)
They do still appear on your personal upvoted comments list, which I appreciate.
I've also noticed that certain network issues can cause comment voting to silently not be registered, unless you happen to reload the page and notice your upvotes are gone.
I use a browser extension to highlight voted posts. I often find this useful when revisiting threads on my desktop after voting for comments on mobile.
• You cannot downvote a comment after 24 hours have passed. (There is no time limit for upvotes.)
• You cannot downvote comments which are direct replies to your own. (There is no restriction to downvote further descendants.)
• You cannot unvote/undown a comment after (I think) one hour has passed.
• You cannot reply to a reply to one of your comments for a certain number of minutes, which increases based on some relation with nesting depth. However, the reply link appears sooner on the permalink of such comments than it does from the story page.
• You cannot edit a comment after (I think) one hour has passed.