That was a legitimate question. I think the problem where the down-voters not you.
To answer the question. Yes you could still vote, but you would need to refresh the page to show the current state. The JS is doing it on the fly.
Maybe people were trying to be helpful by disabling JavaScript and clicking on the down arrow next to your message in order to experimentally determine what the answer to your question was.
Now I see you are downvoted. I thought your comment was humourous which is always alright to me.
In My Humble Opinion downvotes are given out a little too easily here (OK, I'm ready for more downvotes). I hope when I get the downvote ability I will use it wisely, not that many aren't wise.
Downvotes aren't worth worrying about on Hacker News, nor are upvotes. They do tend to even out in time so that only the really objectionable comments get downvoted a lot (and eventually flagged) but because pg more or less decided that there didn't need to be a standard for either, I treat them as worthless.
I take it personally which I know I shouldn't. I think others are the same. You can tell when people say "Why was I downvoted?!".
Everyone wants peer approval. Also you get the same feeling you get when you are being denigrated by someone who doesn't have the backbone to come out and say who they are. I say you get the feeling, not that it is true.
It is kind of fascinating that my votes are going up and down rapidly. Apparently it is a battle of up-voters vs. down-voters. I must have hit a touchy subject.
P.S. I apologize for all the posts. I'll tone it down now.
That would make the whole downvote system useless. Just post spam comments everywhere then delete them after a day and you’ll always have a positive karma.
> That would make the whole downvote system useless
This would not remotely "make the whole downvote system useless". The primary use of the voting system here is to sort out discussion by subjective value. That would only be very indirectly affected (through the very distantly secondary use of karma to confer downvoting ability).
If anything, it would debatably enhance the primary use of the downvote system, by giving authors of unpopular comments an incentive to remove from the discussion what the community has judged to be noise.
Though I would personally hate that, as a fundamentalist anti-deletionist, and as a frequent dissenter from this community's judgements of value.
Ok, I"m facing an armageddon of downvotes but why the heck was this downvoted? He made a point, that while arguable, is a valid comment. Maybe the discussion of downvoting is bringing more downvotes.
Jeeez.
Edit: My upvote brought him back to zero, for now.
I see things more in terms of signal/noise considerations.
Rational minds can disagree, and intelligence can't understand much-greater-intelligence (so lessers might downvote much-greaters for that reason, besides the first-mentioned reason), but you don't have to worry about armageddons of downvotes. Or the balance of votes.
Just upvote what you consider "signal", and downvote the worst kinds of noise.
Thus you, my parent comment, are barely voted on at all, while the one by jewbacca rises to the top all day, no matter the weather.
Seems on-topic to me. You can't call Godwin's Law when the discussion is really about Hitler himself, and you can't claim that discussing how voting works is off-topic when the discussion is about how the voting button works.
Without JS, return false from the vote function wouldn't happen, so I guess clicking upvote would follow node.href, which would send the vote to the server. It would work anyway, there would just be a redirect that would trigger a page refresh. Pretty cool. Just tried it out and confirmed.
