Elbanco obviously cares about HN—kudos. I left HN for about two months (/etc/hosts block; it works). I just started coming back this week. In the interim, I wo

Elbanco obviously cares about HN—kudos. I left HN for about two months (/etc/hosts block; it works). I just started coming back this week. In the interim, I would have to say the overall quality has decreased. It's still better than many other sites, but it isn't as good as it once was. His suggestions to fix the problem are interesting, and I somewhat agree: > Reset the global karma scores to 0 - too many people get votes here simply for being popular. Yes and no. People get "celebrity" votes because they are celebrities. Setting their karma back to 0 isn't going to do any good; it's the name not the karma. > Hide handles on comments until a user votes for that comment. Agreed. Let's make it two or three votes. > Set guidelines for the semantics of karma voting -- is it agree/disagree, great comment/garbage, what is it? Nobody knows. In my understanding it was always been the latter. But it would be great for this to be "formalized." > Require a comment for a vote. Nope. This would create a bevy of useless comments—just so people can vote. > Allow filters. Interesting idea. I'm apathetic towards it. > Ask HN posts (and similar) should decay slower than the rest of the stuff, not faster. Absolutely. The strength of this community is it's ability to clearly answer questions of any nature. Let's have more of it.