The way the first comment is often about something very tangential to the main topic of the post, and then proceeds to attract a large number of replies, completely sucking the oxygen out of the post’s main topic.
Or the way the first comment to a Show HN isn’t about any aspect of the project being shared, but instead is “you might find this other thing interesting”.
Or the inevitable “in mice” comment on any story about medicines.
Or in answer to an article about the discovery of free energy for mankind forever: “the CSS is totally broken”, inevitably followed by “works for me on Firefox”.
• The company that launched a search tool for Hacker News in 2014 is called Algolia, not Agolia.
• Algolia is not just another search tool, but Hacker News’s official one. It’s the tool you’re redirected to if you enter text into the “Search:” text field that appears at the bottom of many HN pages, such as the home page and story pages.
• The paragraph about the comment ‘Did you win the Putnam?’ is missing the link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079. It would also be worth noting that that comment was made in 2007.
I could see the case being made that vouches should be too, but i haven't carefully weighed out my reasons thoughts & feeling on this. Where-as on flagging, it seems screamingly blitz evident.
"Karma" meanwhile goes much farther back, used on GameFAQs in the late 90s.
Slashdot had upvoting and downvoting about a decade before Reddit launched.