> There is no upper limit on the score of a comment, but the minimum score is -4 points.
According to the The Unofficial Hacker News FAQ [1] this is only partly correct, but I don‘t feel like testing it.
[1]
> I’m at -4 for a comment and still my karma is dropping, how come?
> HN is ‘subtle’ in that not everything always is what it seems. Votes are not always counted and those votes that are counted are not always displayed. So even though your vote count for that comment shows as -4, in actual fact it may be much lower. Take your lumps, analyze why you got those downvotes and if you feel they were justified then try to do better in the future. A side effect of the votes still being counted past -4 seems to be that people tend to delete their comments with a much higher frequency than in the past to cap the damage to their karma.
I think what your parent is getting at is that you'll lose at most 4 karma regardless of how many downvotes a comment may eventually accumulate. At least in my experience I haven't seen my karma fall more than 4 points due to a single comment, as far as I can remember. Have you a different experience?
According to the The Unofficial Hacker News FAQ [1] this is only partly correct, but I don‘t feel like testing it.
[1]
> I’m at -4 for a comment and still my karma is dropping, how come?
> HN is ‘subtle’ in that not everything always is what it seems. Votes are not always counted and those votes that are counted are not always displayed. So even though your vote count for that comment shows as -4, in actual fact it may be much lower. Take your lumps, analyze why you got those downvotes and if you feel they were justified then try to do better in the future. A side effect of the votes still being counted past -4 seems to be that people tend to delete their comments with a much higher frequency than in the past to cap the damage to their karma.
https://jacquesmattheij.com/the-unofficial-hn-faq#badcomment