Two HN Announcements

Do we really need these "vouch" link? It seems like complicated for no reasons. People with showdead could just be able to upvote [dead] comments just like other comments (is it not the case already?) and a [dead] comment with enough upvote should be unkilled. And then a banned account with enough unkilled comments should be unbanned. Seems like a simple solution with no changes in the UX.

This reads like a transcript from our early design conversations! What swayed us in the end is that the upvoting and flagging mechanisms are qualitatively different. (In fact it's crazy how different they are.) Whatever's going on there is an important psychological distinction, and collapsing upvoting and flagging for technical reasons—an obvious simplicity win—loses out to that. It's also worth noting that flags are treated differently by the software than downvotes are (or would be if we had them, in the case of stories).

Once we recognized the distinction between voting and flagging it seemed more natural to have this new feature be on the flagging side, hence vouches. The jury's still out on whether it's a good idea or not, though; if it turns out bad, we might consider reverting to the voting idea.

nah, I don't think of flag/vouch as the same as upvote/downvote.

Regardless of the constant arguments around it, I use upvote/downvote on opinions I agree/disagree with. I'd use flag/vouch for things that I don't/do think should be on HN at all.

e.g., on a Pokemon forum I can strongly disagree with someone who says squirtel is the better than pikachu because water-type has more advantages that electric-type. I might downvote it, maybe. But if someone posts "Pokemon are stupid, you're all wasting your lives you big losers." ...I'd flag that. Conversely, if I posted how electric-type pokemon are the best and I notice a dead-reply to me explaining very clearly a position supporting water-type pokemon as best, I'd vouch for it. While I might not agree with the argument, I can at least vouch that it shouldn't be dead.

Ah, fair enough. Thanks for taking the time to explain :).