I vote (up|down) to manipulate the way a thread is displayed. | Hacker News

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		auston on Oct 31, 2009 \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it. I vote (up\|down) to manipulate the way a thread is displayed.

emmett on Nov 1, 2009 [–]

More generally, downvotes exist to provide negative feedback into the system. It's a useful and well understood engineering principle that negative feedback is a useful tool for molding the output of a system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_feedback

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