Online communities that allow upvoting / downvoting have been effectively dead for a long time because it's easy to manipulate conversations by elevating and punishing comments to fit a narrative. This is especially true on HN.

On the other hand I think you need reputation mechanism. The biggest problem of online communities is that every moron (or a bot) has equal voice. Clearly democratic upvotes/downvotes don't work very well though. Someone who solves it is going to be the next billionaire.