Yeah. "Upvote only communities" are more prone to brigading by hyper-motivated cliques or sub-groups. "Upvote+downvote communities" are more resistant to the

Yeah. "Upvote only communities" are more prone to brigading by hyper-motivated cliques or sub-groups. "Upvote+downvote communities" are more resistant to the above, but also more prone to hivemind. It's not clear to me that one is better than the other. It is clear to me that both have significant flaws. Ideally what you really want to promote would be well-reasoned/well-sourced posts from a variety of viewpoints. In practice I simply don't think this can be achieved solely by community voting. It is simply too easy to click an upvote or downvote button for random community members that don't have the incentive to take a more thoughtful approach. Every successful community I've seen has had some level of strong moderator involvement, including HN. (The HN mods kill a lot of low-value posts. Because they do their job well, and they do it with a low profile, many folks are unaware of how much moderation they do...)