On: Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors

[abraae]

Perhaps an additional feature to explicitly mark your post as "rebuttal"? Then only the non-rebuttals would inherit the downvote?

[duskwuff → abraae]

And why would users not simply mark all of their posts as rebuttals? There'd be no downside.

[abraae → duskwuff]

Because rebutting something that was subsequently upvoted would incur a downvote!