On HN in particular, I don't know how downvotes could be made any less psychologically impactful, short of completely hiding comment scores on even your own posts. Comments you posted never change color while you're logged in, so all you ever see is a little number, and the minimum score of -4 prevents massive pile-on situations.
I basically see HN voting as a sort of crowdsourced curation mechanism. I upvote comments that I think should appear closer to the top, and I downvote comments which I think should appear further down, or which should fade out and become easier to skip over. And that's a large part of what makes HN comment threads interesting to read.
I basically see HN voting as a sort of crowdsourced curation mechanism. I upvote comments that I think should appear closer to the top, and I downvote comments which I think should appear further down, or which should fade out and become easier to skip over. And that's a large part of what makes HN comment threads interesting to read.