When you started Hacker News you wanted a site which you could moderate and where users could only upvote (even though users of a certain karma level can downvote), according to Huffman's interview on mixergy. What features did you think were essential a priori that you left out?
This was something that always impressed me with HN. Instead of using a robust, proven forum system, you created a new project that grew with the community, and opened the whole thing up for us to see and even hack ourselves.
The thing is, if we stop downvoting comments like the one you posted (even though it was a completely harmless comment), people would start to think such comments are acceptable and we'd soon have useless comments on HN that would add absolutely no value to the discussion.
