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Maybe this is a good time to start allowing negative karma and downvoting of submissions. If someone has negative karma, then they can't submit until they start
by icey 19y ago
Maybe this is a good time to start allowing negative karma and downvoting of submissions. If someone has negative karma, then they can't submit until they start making good comments at least.
I know pg is worried about mass downvoting, and I think a good way around that is that downvoting anything costs one karma point for the person doing the downvoting. That way you only downvote things that really deserve it... And if you're a chronic downvoter, you wouldn't be able to do it for long as you'd hit Karma 0.
- tjr 19y agoThat will work only if the worthless submissions don't overpower us...
- fiaz 19y agoThe problem with down-voting is that there is no distinction between a spam report and judgmental calls on the content of a link. It changes the dynamic and the quality of links that make it to the top. Having recently come from reddit (and I must say I absolutely LOVE the energy of YC News!!!), I noticed that the down-voting makes submission more competitive and it makes the site less varied and more homogeneous.
- icey 19y agoI disagree (to a degree). If enough people want to spend karma on a downvote then maybe the link doesn't really belong in hacker news anways (I'm looking at you, XKCD posts). If a submitter regularly submits garbage, how much different is it than spam? I mean, if a link is of low quality, maybe it ought to be downvoted & buried.
- fiaz 19y agoBut the fact that other quality links can be liberally up-voted by others would prevent low quality links from rising. The only advantage I can see with the down-voting is that it will make (subjectively) quality links rise faster and poor links sink faster - but this is not necessarily an advantage, at least I don't think it is (I could be TOTALLY missing your point here!).