Seeing a bad submission might encourage others to submit those kinds of links, thus defeating the purpose and ending up in a worse situation. Additionally, sub

Seeing a bad submission might encourage others to submit those kinds of links, thus defeating the purpose and ending up in a worse situation. Additionally, submissions that are upvoted are kept in a "Saved Stories" section of one's profile. I generally use this as a bookmark for things I want to read [again] later. What if the title is potentially interesting yet the contents are trash? I might save it thinking to read it later and it would be counted against me. Further, there is no mechanism to remove a saved story which would be a worthwhile thing to implement. A better approach might be to hand-select N individuals you know are solid community members and make their votes count more. Three points per upvoted story rather than one, for example. To spread this further, take the top N users each of them upvotes the most (beyond a minimum threshold, decaying over time, etc.) and give them two points per upvoted story. With N=20, that gives you a pool of 420 people who can influence the front page to a greater degree than most while still keeping it manageable. You shouldn't need to update your original pool very often and the secondary pool can be recalculated once per day. You could also have a bad pool consisting of those users who were flagged more than once by anyone in the original or secondary pools (again, decaying over time). Their votes could count for nothing. This approach would anchor the community around known, trusted members and let their actions become the drivers for the behavior you wish to encourage. If you wish you had more members like those you hand-pick to upvote stories, what you're really saying is you wish those stories were upvoted more, so giving them more votes achieves that goal. The secondary pool is then reputation-based as is the bad pool.