Comment by altairprime

There’s a missed opportunity here hidden in this drawback: while the site will likely never share downvote reasons with users (any more that it would share flag reasons with us, once those ship), the users who downvote with useless filler reasons could then be labeled as ‘bad faith voters’ by the mods (not for disagreeing but for having an absence of opinion expressed in the downvote reason) so that the ranking algorithm ignores their actions — both downs and ups. It would be an excellent form of penalty, because there’s no way for them to know if it’s applied or not without being in a (prohibited) voting ring, and it would waste dramatically more of their time for each useless downvote, and it would let us see what HN looks like when upvotes exclude those who openly disregard for the community and site’s health. That could be viewed as a win-win scenario!