The Value of Downvoting, or, How Hacker News Gets It Wrong

What really annoys me is that pg took away the ability to downvote a comment after a day or two. Given I use RSS to visit news.yc every few days, that means I can't fully participate; I can upvote people's comments, but not downvote them.

And all because someone went around downvoting all the comments for a particular user they fell out with. It's a sledgehammer, pg! Come up with something better.

Comment votes are a tool for grooming the discussion. Discussion on most threads ends after a day or two. What's the value in downvoting a 3-day-old comment? Very few people are going to respond differently to the thread as a result.

If you want to participate, you should write comments, or, better yet, submissions of your own.

By your reasoning, you think it shouldn't be possible to upvote comments after a couple of days either then?