Still, I get it, it's a kind of super-vote, reserved for people with a little karma (i.e. some "skin in the game"). Out of curiosity, how'd you guys arrive at 30 for cutoff?
You'd be surprised at how different votes and flags are in effect. The upvoting system is a lot more broken than the flagging system is. People tend to upvote as a reflexive "me like" instead of a reflective "this is interesting". (That's not a criticism—it's simply the chemical reaction of the voting mechanism and human nature.) Flagging is much more reflective in practice. You can think of vouches as an experiment in seeing whether up-flagging can contribute as much value to HN as down-flagging has.
Is it important to the design of HN that the community engage with (i.e., not shun into oblivion) worthy points of view with which it disagrees?
If that is valuable to the design of HN, may we simply accept that voting registers agreement and let another mechanism such as the flagging system be the place to register a comment's value? Perhaps we can display the measure of agreement in a more subtle way than is presently the case and refrain from pushing those comments completely out of the conversation.
I was actually hoping for some read on the two questions I gave because I believe these are important issues, and your comment prompted an opportunity to raise them.
Suppose my click on the down arrow expresses the thought "you're wrong, fuck you". HN is better off when that's the end of it...whatever it was and regardless of if it was in the comment or in me or in both.